Screen
Lenovo’s choice of screen on the Yoga 11e is a bit of a mixed bag, because on the one hand, you get a good screen, but on the other, the resolution is a bit of a ho-hum-sigh affair.
Let’s talk quality first, because it’s always good to start out on a positive note, and the 11.6 inch display Lenovo has opted for in the Yoga 11e Gen 2 actually offers a modicum of quality, something you can see when you realise that the machine is also a tablet.
Thanks to a 360 degree hinge, the Yoga 11e can collapse flat and even fold back onto the back of its keyboard, and that turns the machine into a relatively heavy tablet, but a tablet all the same, thanks to that 11 inch screen also being a touchscreen.
That’s super handy, and so is the fact that this isn’t a low-grade display, offering excellent viewing angles, which is something not all hybrid machines tend to get.
Protection on the screen is also a little better than you might get on other displays, and that’s thanks to Dragontrail glass which applies scratch and crack resistance.
Remember all those drops we were doing (begrudgingly)? If you drop it with the screen out, there’s a good chance another computer is going to leave a scratch, or worse: crack under pressure.
Lenovo’s Yoga 11e survives a little better thanks to this reinforcement on the display.
Resolution, though, feels like it’s a touch backwards, or maybe not so much backwards, but rather ordinary.
These days, it’s customary to expect at least HD in a screen, and that’s all you get here, with the 1366×768 resolution offered.
We need to point out that HD isn’t bad in an 11 inch display, and it’s a far more telling sign of a company being cheap when it’s the only resolution in a machine 13 inches or higher, but a little more resolution would have been appreciated, especially since the needs of students are often indicated by the resolution requirements of the apps they’re running, and HD doesn’t always cut it anymore.
Performance
Fortunately, performance appears to be decent, despite some confusingly spec’d innards, which we have to put down to Lenovo’s tweaking and customisation.
Inside the Generation 2 Yoga 11e, you’ll find an Intel Core M processor from the fifth-generation of chips not so dissimilar from the style Apple uses in its ultra-thin MacBook, but with one difference: it’s a slower chip.
Experience with Apple’s MacBook shows that you can’t do a whole lot on it at once, and that’s with a 1.1GHz variant paired with 8GB RAM. Granted, Mac OS is different, but it still gives us a good indication of what to expect from the Lenovo Yoga 11e.
In fact, the Yoga 11e is paired with 4GB RAM and an 800MHz processor, so its performance is likely to be under what we can get out of the MacBook.
But in use, we’re in for a surprise, because Lenovo has tweaked Windows to handle itself, from the fairly quick start-up time to the surprisingly speedy use of Windows 10.
We’ve felt slower Windows machines with better specs, which is genuinely surprising.
Most of our time was spent in productivity apps and web surfing, and for that the machine handled itself well, though we have to assume given the specs, you wouldn’t want much more to be installed here, sadly.
