Last year’s arrival of the X1 Yoga brought some serious firepower in the ultralight business laptop market, and the 2017 flavor of the ThinkPad X1 Yoga raises the barrier to preserve its unique positioning.
If you are not familiar with the ThinkPad X1 Yoga, it does share a lot of traits with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon from which the design ceame from. However, the Yoga does sacrifice a fraction of the weight in return for a good performing digitizer pen and an amazing OLED display option.
From the outside, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga is a tough-as-nails computer which is built to endure things such as military transportation (it is certified for 12 military drop/transports standards tests and 200 Lenovo tests). This year, this computer will also come in Silver color which is the most obvious change at first glance.
At 3.3 Lbs, the X1 Yoga is heavier than the 2.5 Lbs X1 Carbon, but it shares *almost* the same ports configuration: 2 x USB C (Intel Thunderbolt 3), 3 x USB3.0, HDMI, native RJ45, microSD and microSIM. There’s one more full-size USB (Type A) port on the X1 Yoga than there is on the X1 Carbon. Note that the “native RJ45” is a small port that requires an RJ45 dongle. However, it is more performant as the RJ45-to-USB adapters that many people buy.
The big difference with the Carbon X1 2017 is the presence of the digitizer pen. The 2017 edition has been improved with a new elastomer tip, which makes the writing even more natural as before. We’re looking forward to trying it because we were already impressed with the original version. The pen stays docked inside the X1 Yoga chassis and is always available when you need it. It charges extremely quickly and minutes of charge will yield hours of use. Typically, we’ve never had a real-world case where we ran out of Pen battery.
As always, the Yoga chassis makes this computer a multimode laptop, which means that it can work in many different positions which is each optimum for the task at hand (Laptop, Tablet, Stand and Tent modes). Lenovo introduced this concept with the original Yoga laptop, and the idea has since generated many clones across almost all major PC OEMs.
The login security works the same way as on the X1 Carbon: you can login with your fingerprint or by using the infrared (IR) camera that scans your face in 3D. Scanning your face is new in the X1 Yoga 2017 and uses Windows Hello.
The ThinkPad X1 Yoga has three display options. First the IPS LCD 1080p (FHD, 1920×1080): this is the basic one which works very well and provides the best battery life. Secondly, there is a WQHD IPS LCD (2560×1440) which can display high-resolution photos much better and improves the text reading comfort. Finally, there’s a WQHD OLED option which is, in my opinion, the best one yet.
The OLED display is unique (no other 14” laptop comes with an OLED display) and offers not only 100% Adobe RGB color reproduction but also a nearly infinite contrast ratio and true black color.
Learn more: LCD vs. OLED. Which is Best And Why?
The display is powered by an Intel Iris graphics, which is a higher tier of Intel GPUs (graphics processors). They can run the occasional game but aren’t considered to be “gaming capable” on our book. But they certainly perform well for other application such as regular graphic design, light video editing, etc…
The ThinkPad X1 Yoga remains one of the hottest 14” computer on the market, and competes mainly with its cousin the ThinkPad Yoga X1 Carbon.
Filed in . Read more about CES, CES 2017, Laptops and Lenovo.