Yoga Pro 3 review: Broadwell is a mixed blessing

When Lenovo launched its first Yoga laptop, it seemed rather weird. It arrived on a wave of new Windows 8-oriented devices that tried all manner of new things to offer the best of the traditional laptop and the tablet experience. The Yoga’s premise was simple: make a hinge that bends all the way around, so you can fold the laptop back on itself to make it into a sort of chunky tablet.

It skewed more heavily towards laptop usage than tablet usage—there are no compromises when using it as a laptop, unlike, for example, Microsoft’s Surface Pro range—but still offered that flexibility for those who wanted it. Although designed to let the device transform into a tablet, it is perhaps the other positions that have been the real winners with the Yoga’s hinge: what Lenovo calls “tent mode,” where the keyboard is folded most of the way back to prop the screen up, is excellent when watching movies in planes and similar cramped situations, as it drastically shrinks the footprint of the device.

This flexibility made the Yoga design one of the big winners.

The IdeaPad Yoga 13 pioneered the design. The Yoga Pro 2 brought in a good-looking 3200×1800, 13.3 inch, 276 ppi screen and a Haswell generation processor. The new Yoga Pro 3 adds a new, more elaborate hinge design, and bumps the processor up to a Broadwell part, the Core M-5Y70.

About that processor

As nifty as the new hinge is, the processor is in many ways the point of this refresh. The previous Yogas used U-series processors. These are Intel’s Ultrabook-oriented parts, with a 15W TDP. The new Broadwell processor, however, is a Y-series part. Y-series processors are ultra low power; the chip in the Yoga Pro 3 has just a 4.5W TDP. This has implications for the clock speed of processor. While both the Haswell Core i5-4200U and Broadwell Core M-5Y70 notionally have a 2.6GHz maximum clock frequency, the Haswell part has a base frequency of 1.6GHz, compared to just 1.1GHz for the Broadwell.

While Broadwell is a little faster on a clock normalized basis, it’s not the nearly 50 percent faster that it would need to be to make up for that base clock deficit. That low TDP also limits the ability to boost the clock speed on a sustained basis.

This has obvious performance implications, and the performance of the Yoga Pro 3 just isn’t that hot. It trails the Yoga Pro 2 in almost every test, with both its GPU and CPU posting inferior scores.

The one exception where it’s about equal or slightly faster are the browser-based tests. We’d guess that this is because these tests are very short and single-threaded. This is the one situation where the Broadwell part can (temporarily) match the clockspeed of the Haswell part, and since Broadwell is slightly faster when at the same clockspeed, this gives the Yoga Pro 3 a very slight edge.

That lower power consumption could have one upside; longer battery life. Our testing so far is unfortunately a little inconclusive. At 50 percent brightness, the same situation as we tested the Yoga Pro 2, the 3 certainly delivers much more, closing in at almost ten hours compared to just over six. This comes in spite of the 3 having a smaller battery—44Wh compared to the older model’s 54Wh. However, 50 percent brightness feels quite dim, and wouldn’t be comfortable in well-lit environments. Crank up to 100 percent and the battery life seems to drop perilously, to just under 5 hours.

Ten hours is respectable; five hours is not. We’re still investigating this a little more thoroughly to compare the 2 and 3 with calibrated screens and with some more intensive tests to get a better handle on how the two stack up. The new system does seem to have a better battery life than its predecessor, but still far from class-leading. The 2.96 lb Haswell MacBook Air manages to squeeze in a 54Wh battery, and runs for almost 12 hours in the same test. Of course, the MacBook Air’s screen is lower resolution, doesn’t support touch, and doesn’t have the fancy hinge, but if I’m on on a day of hopping between planes and running around airports, as I often am, I’d give up all of those things for longer life.

The Yoga 3 Pro showing off its elaborate hinge in action.

Credit: Lenovo

If the new processor hasn’t done a whole lot for performance or battery life, there is one area where the new Yoga Pro 3 surpasses its predecessor: size. The new version is both thinner, at 0.5 inches, and lighter, dropping 0.44 lbs to 2.62. The biggest impact this has is on tablet mode. While it’s still on the heavy side for a tablet, each time Lenovo makes it thinner and lighter, it makes that use-case more and more viable.

The processor helps that out a little, as the Yoga Pro 3 never got very hot, even when under load. Hot spots aren’t such an issue for a laptop sitting on a desk, but they can be annoying on a tablet held in the hand. The Yoga Pro 3 gets warm, but no more than that. It has a fan, apparently, but it didn’t make its presence heard.

An 800 part hinge

The new hinge is a remarkable thing. It’s complicated and detailed and fiddly, and it seems to work, if anything, too well. It’s extraordinarily stiff, capable of holding the screen at any position from barely open all the way to tablet mode. The downside here is that the Pro 3 is actually hard to open. Forget about opening it one-handed. There are no notches to help you get some purchase on the thing: you’ll have to prise it open every time.

While a little awkward, I hope that it ensures the system’s longevity. Laptop hinges tend to get looser as they get older. This is annoying at the best of times, but on a machine where the flexibility of the hinge is a core feature, that’s even less desirable.

The screen, as on the Pro 2, remains beautiful. The high resolution means that running it at 200 percent scaling is preferred, and unfortunately, this continues to show the occasional bug, usually in third-party software, but even Microsoft titles screw up occasionally. Most of the time, however, it works very well.

Most disappointingly, Lenovo has continued its long-standing practice of messing with keyboards. The keyboard has shed its row of function keys, instead requiring the use of Fn-key combinations to do simple things such as hit F5 to reload a Web page, or F1 for help. I’ve written before about my distaste for this kind of thing, and everything I said then stands now. The F-keys may be “power user” features, I suppose, but that seems a poor reason to omit them. This is, after all, a machine that’s styled as a “pro” machine, with a premium price tag. Intuitively, I feel that power users will want proper F-keys.

Look at all the space around the keyboard! Is the small trackpad and 5-row keyboard really the best Lenovo can do here?

It’s not as if Lenovo has used the space for anything useful. The keyboard has a large empty expanse above it, and the trackpad, below the keyboard, feels small. Though I don’t know what constraints there are inside the machine, it looks, superficially at least, that the keyboard could both have an extra row and a little more width, to for example allow Home and End to have their own keys instead of being doubled up Fn-based combinations. I simply don’t understand this trend of removing all the “unnecessary” keys on a keyboard.

The keys that Lenovo hasn’t yet discarded feel solid with a good, if short travel, feel. The keys are backlit tastefully. The trackpad seemed responsive enough to me, I just wish it was bigger to afford greater precision. Enlarging the trackpad would also make it easier to use multifinger gestures.

They keyboard has a textured, rubbery surround. This feels nice, and avoids the uncomfortable sharp edges of some laptops, but it’s an absolute magnet for dirt and dust and fingerprints.

The Yoga Pro 3 has a handful of pre-installed apps; a mix of maintenance utilities, general interest Metro apps such as e-Bay and the Weather Channel, and reading apps with both Kindle and Zinio preinstalled.

Top, from left to right: combo charging/USB 2, USB 3, micro-HDMI, SD. Bottom, from left to right: power, firmware screen, rotation lock, volume, combo headphone/microphone, USB 3

Credit: Lenovo

The one standout app, for all the wrong reasons, was called OneKey Optimizer. For all the world this app feels like a throwback to those 1990s “Windows optimizers” that make a bunch of ill-advised “registry tweaks” to notionally optimize system performance but in reality break things in subtle ways. Strikingly, an out-of-the-box Yoga Pro 3 isn’t, according to this application, “optimized.” There are services that could be disabled, it tells me, settings that need to be tweaked. So I ask rhetorically, if Lenovo is sufficiently confident of the optimizations this app makes that it’s going to preinstall it, shouldn’t it equally be sufficiently confident to simply apply those optimizations by default?

A bit of a mixed bag

It’s clear with the Yoga that Lenovo has nailed the form factor. The lighter weight and reduced thickness of the Yoga Pro 3 make that form factor work better than ever before, and the fancy hinge, while very stiff, should mean that it will continue to work well throughout the system’s life. The screen is beautiful; the input devices are a step backwards.

The Broadwell processor has proven a mixed blessing. Battery life is better (though arguably still somewhat short of what it could or should be at this price), performance is a little worse, temperatures are comfortable. We wonder what might have been if Intel had released Broadwell’s U range already; those parts should address the performance deficit, while still offering a power improvement relative to Haswell.