Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 review: An absolute corker at this price

 

Quick verdict

Once again, Lenovo offers us a master class on how to build a world-class laptop for under a grand. If you need an ultra-high-resolution projector, there's very little reason to invest any more.

For

Magnificent results
Ultra-long lifetime of batteries
The Good Value
High-quality construction technology
Excellent contrast monitor

Against
The Webcam Poor
Speakers are heavily reliant on Dolby Atmos DSP
No connector with Thunderbolt

(Pocket-lint) - Under the four-figure mark, Lenovo makes some of the very best laptops. And this, the Slim 7 Lenovo Yoga, is probably the one you need to buy.

Sure, the MacBook Air is a more exciting and much more strong prospect. But one of the best reasons not to buy a MacBook in 2021 is probably the Yoga Slim 7. Yeah, and I think we should note that it's hundreds of times cheaper.

Its build quality is excellent, it almost definitely has more power than you need, its screen is excellent in most respects, and some recent games can even be managed well enough by the AMD edition (as reviewed here).

Once again, Lenovo offers us a master class on how to build a world-class laptop for under a grand. If you need an ultra-high-resolution projector, there's very little reason to invest any more.

Design

• Dimensions: 320.6mm x 208mm x 14.9mm
• 1.4kg claimed weight (1.326kg measured)
• Finishes: Slate Grey / Orchid Purple
• Aluminium shell design

An odd category is high-end laptops. Often you end up with a laptop that feels less costly if you spend more on jumping up a league. Instead of mostly aluminium alloys, many of the more costly ones use magnesium alloys: lighter but less metallic to the touch.

The case panels of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 are aluminium. Instead of, well, a few hundred grammes less, this contributes to a weight of 1.3kg, but you get the same lovely cool-to-the-touch feeling as a MacBook.

The screen is stiff, the keyboard doesn't bow under your fingers' pressure, and in a minimalist way, it's a classy-looking laptop.

This isn't quite the gadget that you would expect, though, because it's part of the Yoga series. The screen of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 folds open to 180 degrees, not 360 degrees hybrid-style, and it does not have a touchscreen.

It's certainly a notebook, not a lifestyle computer that feels it can replace an iPad. Lenovo has its sights on buyers of the MacBook Air, so some of the main figures are identical. Like Air, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 is 16 mm thick, and the weight is more or less the same too.

Display

• 14-inch IPS panel, 300 nits brightness
• 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution
• No touchscreen control

A 14-inch IPS LCD screen is provided for the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7. It's here we see this laptop start to move away from one that costs hundreds more - but less so than you might guess.

This is a 1080p screen, which means you'll see minor pixellation in small fonts. Lenovo does make a 4K version, but this doesn't seem to be sold as commonly as the Full HD Yoga 7 Slim.

We have no complaints in nearly every other respect, though. In some fields, it actually outperforms Lenovo's own claims.

For example, Lenovo says the 1080p Yoga 7 Slim reaches 300-nit brightness. But by our measure, it really hits 385 nits. The extra headroom makes the show appear smoother outdoors, and it also has a matte finish that reduces reflection. It reveals just how good this laptop is set when you have some high-end laptops promoting 500 nits as some kind of untouchable accomplishment.

Lenovo claims that the colour of the screen matches the colour standard of sRGB, the old industry standard for monitors and printers. But its colour coverage, by our measure, is actually 20 percent richer than that.

Sure, a MacBook Air or Dell XPS 13 still has deeper colours, but if you are going to colour grade video or do other pro imaging work, you just need to worry about that. The colour of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 looks well-saturated to our eyes.

Thanks to the great contrast of the show, part of the eyeball-pleasing effect is: it is 1762:1 at peak brightness, which is an excellent result for an LCD panel. Blacks should not look grey and washed out.

The sleek presentation you get from a glass-topped glossy screen is what it really lacks in this class. A glossy display's screen image can tend to pop more than a matte one like this, and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 has a top layer of plastic with a slightly raised surround.

This is more a consequence of the decision to use a matte finish, however, than a way for Lenovo to save a few pennies when the Yoga Slim 7 is made.

Keyboard & Touchpad

• 2-level white LED backlight
• NUMPAD-free chiclet keyboard
• Wide aspect textured glass trackpad
  

Do you want any more proof that Lenovo is not cost-cutting on the sly? There is a mid-size textured glass touchpad on the Yoga Slim 7.

This laptop sits right at the border where manufacturers appear to turn from using relatively inexpensive plastic pads to fancier glass pads. In a laptop range that starts at this price, seeing textured glass is by no means a given though.

There is also zero pre-click wobble and nice'n' firm clicker feedback on the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 'pad. We also saw zero driver or sensitivity problems, always prompting us to disable Windows 10's tap-based button response.

This is, in short, one of the best pads you'll see in this class.

The keyboard of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 is less impressive, but it still does the job perfectly well. Key travel is limited, much less than the popular deep ThinkPad laptops from Lenovo, but the feedback on the activation is strong.

This is a keypad that is relatively quick and light-feeling. It also has a two-level backlight, and more than normal, we turned it on. If there is a light pointed directly at the keyboard, the key lettering contrast drops off as the keys and surroundings are a metallic grey, with less colour contrast than others.

You'd guess at a glance that there is no fingerprint scanner here. But the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 has one on the side that is built into the power button.

Performance & Speakers

• 2x 2W speakers with Dolby Atmos DSP
• Ryzen 7 4700U CPU with Vega 8 graphics
• 8GB DDR4X RAM

Lenovo renders the Yoga 7 Slim in both Intel and AMD models. An AMD one with a Ryzen 7 4700U, 8 GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD is our review model.

This configuration is not quite as powerful as the M1 processor of a MacBook Air, but it is better than the Intel Core i5 or i7 10th Generation that you might find in another model. For a mite more, you can get a Core i7 Processor version of this same laptop, but we'd stick with AMD.

Although Intel provides better performance in single-core applications, at eight, AMD has twice the number of cores. And while this is a low-voltage processor that is designed for laptops that are slim and compact, it is punchy.

In Yoga 7 Slim, Windows 10 runs like a dream. The very fast SSD, which reads data at a shade below 3500MB/s, allows this. Once again: no cuts related to the spending here.

"The Ryzen 7 4700U of the Yoga 7 Slim also has better built-in graphics than anything on the Intel side (bar the "Xe" GPU of the new 11th Generation chipsets). You may not get a total laptop gaming experience here, but we're pretty happy provided that it fits into a slim and light shell.

The Witcher 3 is more of a game, but one that can still be played. Stick to the 900p resolution and if you can live with some dips to the 20fps range when you get into battle or walk around towns, you can play at low levels, 30ps, comfortably, or at medium.

Like the HP Envy 13, a laptop with an Nvidia MX450 graphics card can run games better. Based on background, it's 50-100 percent more effective. But the Yoga 7 Slim results are still much better than the vanilla 10th Gen Intel laptop results.

With some caveats to remember, the Yoga 7 Slim also has respectable speakers. In those apparent hole-pocked grilles, there are drivers on either side of the keyboard.

Although not completely MacBook-grade, there is some real mid-range performance and decent volume in the sound. But much of that comes from optical signal processing from Dolby Atmos.

Atmos is typically a means of adding channels of height to a mix, whether with actual or virtual speakers. But for laptops, the main effect of this programme is to maximize the performance of small drivers.

In the Lenovo Yoga 7 Slim, you hear this in full effect, as the speakers sound weak, quiet and thin with Dolby Atmos disabled. Switching on the audio appears to manipulate tone, which is a combination of the influence of the processing on the soundstage and the drivers of the laptop are forced to their limits when the volume is almost complete. Still, in this price band, the outcome remains more strong than that of other laptops.

Connections & Webcam

• 720p webcam with IR for login
• 1x HDMI, 2x USB-C (1x with DisplayPort)

Laptop connections are a little like jacks for headphones on tablets. Spend more and there are also fewer ports you end up with. The Yoga 7 Slim has plenty for our needs. You get two USB-C - the standard outlay for an ultra-pricey laptop - plus a stack of “older” connections.

There's a full-size HDMI, two USB 3.2 ports, a microSD card slot, and a headphone jack. It's only missing connectors that frankly don't belong on a laptop like this in 2020, such as an Ethernet port and VGA connector.

We like that Lenovo understands that not everyone who buys a Yoga 7 Slim is going to turn to USB-C peripherals entirely.

That said, it doesn't get the same attention from the webcam. It's a 720p camera that has a dull, soft picture. You should log in with the app, since there's a Windows Hello-compatible IR camera on the side. This is used independently of the amount of light to identify the face. In low light, the webcam itself doesn't hold up too well.

Battery Life

• 60.4Wh battery
• 65/95W charging (65W adapter included)
• Charging over USB-C

Lenovo makes a huge statement about the Yoga 7 Slim's battery, that it can last up to 17.5 hours. We were completely prepared to do our regular spiel on how manufacturers measure their laptops' batteries with benchmarks from the 1970s, using screen settings so dim you can't even see the display. And then, well, we did some of our own research.

Only the charge level fell to 70 percent for five hours of 1080p downloaded YouTube at 60 percent brightness, indicating a cumulative runtime of around 16 hours 40 minutes.

That seemed almost unbelievably long, so before the battery died, we tried playing The Witcher 3. The brightness of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 was maximized and we minimized the graphics settings and resolution to increase the load on the CPU while still using 100% of the power of the GPU. We began at 4:58 pm, and died at 6:47 pm. A shade in less than two hours: better than most gaming laptops, but the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 doesn't have a dedicated power-hungry GPU again.

For our reviews at Pocket-lint, we like to focus as much on real-world usage as possible. But what really caught our attention was the Lenovo Yoga 7 Slim battery, so we put it through some more battery benchmarks.

The PC-testing suite PCMark 10 has a set of tests that simulate real-world scenario workloads. We have tried "modern office" that uses some simple browsing and productivity apps punctuated by some holes, stand-ins for making a cup of tea or slacking off on your computer.

Using its CPU-throttling Battery Saver mode, the Yoga 7 Slim lasts 20 hours 1 minute at 50 percent screen brightness. This seemed insane, so we re-ran the test at 73% luminosity and disabled the processor limits. It was already 18 hours and 11 minutes long.

We're giving in. Everything is real. The Slim Lenovo Yoga 7 lasts forever.

At 60.7Wh, its battery is large, 17 percent greater than the current Dell XPS 13. The real hero here, however, is the AMD Ryzen 4700U, which scales so well between levels of effort that it begins to look more like the groundbreaking Apple M1 Processor.

Charging pace, however, is less impressive. Charging from the flat takes about 2.5 hours. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 recharges via USB-C and comes with a 65W adapter. For 50 percent juice in 30 minutes - just like a decent Android phone - this laptop supports a form of fast-charging, but this requires Lenovo's 95W charger (and we didn't get one in the box).

Verdict

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 will never be as famous as the MacBook Air and Dell XPS 13, but for many, we think it's a better all-round purchase. For the most equivalent Air spec, Apple charges a premium. The nearest configuration of the Dell XPS 13 costs much more and playing games is worse.

But not everything is about money. The Yoga Slim 7 has a beautiful aluminium housing, lots of power, lots of storage, a vibrant screen, a great trackpad for glass, and an extremely long battery life.

Yes, if its speakers had better quality drivers and it had a webcam without cataracts, we would love the Yoga Slim 7 even more. But for them, can we pay hundreds more? Not an opportunity. As it is, at this price point, this is one of the best available laptops.

Also consider

HP Envy 13

The HP Envy 13, pound for pound, is perhaps the most appealing alternative to yoga. For its potency and all-metal construction, we loved the late 2019 edition, all at the right price. Thanks to the Nvidia MX450 graphics card, the 2020 update provides you with much improved gaming performance. The Lenovo, however, lasts longer and has a better CPU and a glass touchpad.

MacBook Air 13

All right, so the MacBook Air is a laptop that's more interesting than the Lenovo Yoga 7, but is it a better buy? We'd buy Air for video editing and other intensive work. It would be easier to use M1 processor-optimized apps and results, and the battery will last much longer. The Lenovo costs a stack less if you need 512 GB of storage rather than 256 GB, however, thanks to Apple's costly upgrades scheme.

Dell XPS 13

Dell is a royalty to the Windows laptop. But if you're at the heart of computing, it just seems obvious that Lenovo is a better purchase. It's more efficient, the battery is bigger and lasts longer using multi-core optimized apps. All the advantages of the XPS 13 have to do with design and portability. It has a smaller size, is slightly lighter and 4mm thinner. You'll have to decide if that's worth several hundred pounds.