lenovo yoga 11s

Mao_Zedong · June 15, 2014

The yoga 11s was released a year ago with ivy bridge, even though haswell was already out. Later, lenovo released the yoga 11s with haswell. recently they released the yoga 2 11, a slightly lower end 11" yoga. I have had the yoga 11s haswell for a few months now, so here is my review. NOTE: this is my first laptop/notebook, so just remember that, before this i have had a nexus 7 (dead), an iphone 3gs (dead), and iphone 4s, and an hp desktop from 2009 that i put a gtx 660 in.

Design 9/10
The design is pretty good, two grey layers of plastic with black in between and inside. only things to make it better would be metal, and being all black, but those are just my personal preferences.

Performance 16/20
For general use, it performs great (unlike the yoga 2 11). It can play 1080p video fine, and would be plenty for other basic tasks. The ssd is great, and makes it very snappy for most things.

Benchmarks: the yoga 11s has an intel 4210Y, so gets a score of 2207 on passmark (based on standard 4210y benchmarks, not this one in particular). the surface pro 3 on the other hand, has an intel 4300U, which gets a score of 3719 on passmark.

Gaming: the only game that i can see fps on that i play is minecraft, i can get 45-60fps with medium settings (8 chunks, no smooth lighting, fast graphics). until i put it on performance mode, i was very disappointing in the gaming performance, i was getting 25-30 fps, but when i switched to performance mode, it was WAY better. In performance mode i get a few hours of battery life with max brightness.

Keyboard/Touchpad 8/10
the keyboard and touchpad are decent; the keyboard has low travel distance, but that is required for a laptop this thin, especially one that converts to a tablet. the touchpad is pretty good, but it is correlated to the mouse, so to use one well the other one is either way too fast or way too slow, but this could be fixed.

Screen 7/10
The screen is nice, though the resolution is just 1366x768, but it still looks pretty nice.

Windows 8 9/10 (not included in final score)
Windows 8 really isn't bad, i had only used windows 7 before this (i had used vista for a few weeks, and either xp of something before that, but i don't really remember those), and windows 8.1 hasn't been worse in any significant way (that start menu isn't nice looking, but its functional) one reviewer said that the yoga (2 13) was the first device that windows 8 was actually good on, but i am not sure.

Connectivity 8/10
For ports, it has 1 usb 3.0, 1 usb 2.0, 1 headphone/microphone jack, 1 HDMI, 1 sd card reader, and a nice lenovo charging port. for wireless it has a single band (i think) wifi solution, but it is good enough, i get 20-30 mbps on speed test.

Yoga modes 9/10
The yoga modes are great, i use laptop 70% tablet 10% and (whatever it is called when i have the keyboard upside down, and the screen facing me) 20%

Overall 57/70=8.1/10

Overall it is a good device, it is powerful enough to do basic work, and is very light for a laptop. for the price, there are options with 1080p screens and cpus 4x as powerful, but those are much larger. if you want a convertible, this is definitely an option to consider, though the yoga 2 pro is much better if you can afford it.

please like this post, as it took around an hour to wright.

ZetZet · June 15, 2014

It was expensive. And I don't like touchscreen laptop idea. It's either non-touch or tablet with a dock. :lol:

Mao_Zedong · June 15, 2014

It was expensive. And I don't like touchscreen laptop idea. It's either non-touch or tablet with a dock. :lol:

the only reason i got it is that i will be getting a bulky laptop for school next year (the school provides it) so this is basically just a windows tablet for me, it is mostly used for light gaming, watching videos, and things like that. I was planning on getting a dell venue 8, but then my dad said "you should get a bigger tablet, and i will pay the price difference" and when i said i liked the yoga 2 11, he said get the yoga 11s, it costs a lot more, but i think it would be worth it, so he got me that.