Friday 24 October 2014

Lenovo’s Latest Hybrid Laptop Is Just as Bendy, But Packs a Super-Efficient Chip

Lenovo’s Latest Hybrid Laptop Is Just as Bendy, But Packs a Super-Efficient Chip

Tim Moynihan
Wired



How interesting is Lenovo’s super-bendy Yoga 3 Pro laptop? Interesting enough to inspire a trilogy of really awkward Ashton Kutcher poses . But if you look beyond those photos and its versatile hinge, the new Windows 8.1 convertible laptop will back up its pliable hardware with state-of-the-art components.

The Yoga 3 Pro is one of the first laptops to offer Intel’s next-generation “Broadwell” CPU—it has a dual-core Intel Core M-70 system on a chip—which is designed to deliver Core i5-like performance with much lower power consumption. And because Broadwell is built to run without a fan, the 13.3-inch Yoga 3 Pro is also dead-silent and superslim.

It’s about the thickness of a USB 3.0 port, and the new convertible laptop has two of them. The Yoga 3 Pro also has a built-in SD card reader, an HDMI-out port, and stereo JBL speakers. This machine is just half an inch thick and weighs 2.63 pounds—thinner and lighter than the 13-inch MacBook Air.
It doesn’t get quite as much juice, though. According to Lenovo, the new laptop grants up to 9 hours of battery life per charge of its battery. That’s a solid two- to three-hour improvement over its predecessor, the Core i5-powered Yoga 2 Pro. Like its predecessor, the Yoga 3 Pro has a sharp 13.3-inch IPS display with QHD+ resolution (3200 x 1800). It’s a touchscreen, which will prove useful when that screen is flipped all the way back in tablet mode.

Compared to previous models, the new Yoga convertible also has a metallic “watchband-inspired” hinge that lets you position the screen sturdily across a 360-degree range. The hinge secures the screen nicely, but the exposed aluminum-and-steel gears mean that you’ll want to make sure your ponytail is clear of the Yoga 3.

At $1,300 for the lowest-end configuration, it’s on the pricier side, but that higher cost of entry gets you a 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM standard. The highest-end setup, which bulks the storage up to a 512GB solid-state drive, will go for $1,700. The Yoga 3 Pro will be available in silver, gold, and orange and ship by the end of October. It’s available for preorder on Lenovo’s website and Best Buy now. 

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