Top tech trends at CES 2016: Virtual reality to 8K TVs
Tech Take: Popular Science's Michael Nunez on the latest technology debuting at CES 2016 including virtual reality headsets, smart appliances and 8K TVs
LAS VEGAS – I can't believe how light and thin this thing is. We saw and reviewed Lenovo's Yoga 900 not too long ago, a roughly 14mm-thin workhorse running the latest Intel Core i7 CPU. Lenovo's newest convertible hybrid laptop, the Yoga 900S, doesn't quite have the internals of its bigger brother, but it is an incredibly light and thin lifestyle device that can run simple processes with a breeze.
To start, the Yoga 900S is, according to Lenovo, the thinnest convertible hybrid laptop on the market—only 12.8mm thick. You can pick it up easily with one hand, as it weighs just over two pounds. At a glance, you'd think it would be quite flimsy, yet its carbon fiber construction feels very solid and study. I tried bending the body a little to see if the chassis bent, and it wouldn't budge.
The construction on the Yoga 900S is very pretty, with slim colored keys and a colored 360-degree hinge that matches the chassis (sold in either champagne gold or silver). The screen is a bright, 12.5-inch, 2,560-by-1,440 Quad-HD display, and the laptop even supports Wacom's active pen (sold separately).
So if you bend it into tablet mode, it can act as a notebook, or you can annotate Web pages in Microsoft Edge. Most convertible hybrid laptops feel awkward and bulky in tablet mode due to their heft. This one does not; it's one of the few convertibles that can easily work as a tablet.
In sum, it's pretty. It's the belle of the ball in terms of Lenovo's new laptop lineup, which includes revamped ThinkPads and hunky Carbon notebooks. Unfortunately, the Yoga 900S's internals don't quite match up to the Yoga 900.
(PC Mag)
The Yoga 900S runs an Intel Core m7 (compared to the Intel Core i7 found in the Yoga 900), a chip that's more worthy of a fairly powerful tablet than a top-of-the-line PC. It only gets up to 8GB of memory to the Yoga 900's 16GB of RAM, but maxes out at 512GB of internal storage. Lenovo claims that it has made the Yoga 900S quite thin without sacrificing battery life, saying it can get up to 10.5 hours on a single charge—a long time, indeed. We'll have to test to verify that one.
The dimmed-down specs could matter a lot to a power user, but it doesn't matter too much to someone looking for a beautiful convertible hybrid that's capable of light enterprise tasks. As I said, it's one of the prettier convertible hybrid laptops we've seen, and will slip easily into any messenger bag. Actually, don't do that. You probably won't even know it's there if you do.
The Lenovo Yoga 900S starts at $1,099, and is available starting in March.
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