Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 2 review

It may have taken a few goes to get right, but the IdeaPad Yoga 11 2 might just be Lenovo’s best 11in ultraportable yet. At just £500, it’s much cheaper than most laptops with a reversible hinge design, and its brand new Intel Baytrail Pentium processor is impressively quick for the money, making it much better value than most other budget hybrids including Lenovo’s own Yoga spin-off, the Flex 15.

It borrows the same superb build quality as the 11S, incorporating its signature 360-degree hinge into a tiny 11in chassis that’s just 17mm thick and weighs 1.4kg. It’s still a little heavy to hold with one hand, but its uniform thickness and rubbery finish were both comfortable and provided plenty of grip. Its size also makes it a much more natural fit to use as a tablet than its big brother, the 13in Yoga 2 Pro.

Unsurprisingly, ports are at a minimum, but you still get one USB3 and one USB2 port, a mini HDMI video output, an SD card reader and a combined headphone and microphone jack. There’s also a volume rocker and a dedicated screen lock button to turn its auto-rotate feature on and off. Inside, there’s a 500GB hard disk for storing your files.

The 11.6in touchscreen was a joy to use. Its ten-point touch support was extremely responsive and we were able to open and close windows on its 1,366×768 resolution display without any trouble. Its wide viewing angles were also excellent, making it easy to see the screen from a variety of angles without any degradation in image quality.

We were pleased with the Yoga 11 2’s colour accuracy as well. Its sRGB colour gamut reading of 65.5 per cent was just above average, but colours still looked bright and vibrant thanks to its strong red and yellow coverage. Our solid colour image tests all showed a welcome sense of depth and richness, thanks in part to the screen’s glossy finish, and its low black level of just 0.17cd/m2 meant there weren’t any traces of grey in our solid black test.

The screen’s contrast levels were also excellent, as we measured a contrast ratio of 951:1. This is great for a laptop of this price, and we were able to see a very high level of detail in all of our test shots. Its high contrast levels also helped keep the screen visible at all times when we used the Yoga 11 2 as a tablet.