I was privileged to receive a Yoga 900 for testing and review. This is the newest addition to Lenovo’s line of convertible laptops and based on what I have observed after some use of it, Lenovo has listened to and incorporated changes based on user feedback concerning the previous versions of this line.

All in – the Yoga 900 is a tiny bit thicker and a bit heavier then its predecessor, the Yoga 3 Pro, but there are reasons for this.

The first reason is that there is a new keyboard – the keys have a bit more travel to them and it also inludes a 6th row of keys. It now has a dedicated Function (F) row. By default, the hotkey functions are accessible by pressing the appropriate hotkey. However, you can disable the hotkey mode in the BIOS setup utility. There is slightly more travel to the keys and they seem easier to type on than previous versions.

It also has Intel’s latest line of processors, the 2-Core Skylake i7-6500U @ 2.40 GHz which has resulted in a definite increase in performance over the M Processor which was in the Yoga 3 Pro.  This is coupled with 8 GB of RAM and Intel HD Graphics 520.

The display is a 3200 x 1800 resolution 13 inch capacitive screen and has excellent vciewing angles, as well as a full 10-finger touch.  The response to touch is flawless: at no time did the display ever register any ghost touches or act any way that it wasn’t supposed to.  The display is viewable in sunlight but there is some reflection.  However, at no time was I unable to view the screen.

The hard drive in this machine is the Samsung MANLN512HCJHOOOOL2 aand is at 512 GB (SATA-600) and runs very fast.

This also comes with a great selection of ports.  On the left side of the laptop are the power port, a USB 3.0 port, a memory card slot, and it now has a Type-C port which supports USB 3.0, Native display port 1.2 video output and VGA/HDMI adapter which is sold separately.  On the right side is a Battery and Power status indicator, the power button, the Novo button, the rotation lock button, the combo audio jack and another USB 3.0 port.

There are a variety of modes that this machine can be used in, laptop mode, tent mode Both shown above and tablet mode shown below.  The screen rotates 360 degrees and in tablet mode the keyboard is disabled.

The battery is now a 67000 mWh and it should give at least six hours watching movies or using power intensive programs.  I got 7 hours just surfing the internet and that is without having any power saving enabled.

The machine comes with Windows 10 Pro preloaded and it runs fast and smooth.  I haven’t found any issues yet with the preload.  The number of preloaded apps has been reduced significantly, again possibly as a result of user feedback.  There aren’t many third party programs loaded and the ones that are, are useful.

Tablet Mode

Tent Mode

Yoga 3 Pro and Yoga 900

Here you can see the slight thickness difference.

Above is the Yoga 900 with the new 6 row keyboard.

And that beautiful watchband hinge.

All in all, Lenovo certainly has listened to the feedback and changed some things that needed changed but kept the features that made the convertible laptops great.  One of these was the watchband hinge, which I really like a lot.  Power management handles the fan pretty well, under high load the fan speeds up like it is supposed to and powers back down under light load just like it is supposed to.

Lenovo has put together a well rounded convertible laptop that is powerful and smooth running.  I like the silver gray color also.