Keyboard and mouse
Over in the keyboard department, it’s all high class Lenovo, and this is one area we’ve come to expect great things from the company.
Two companies tend to really stand out in the laptop arena for the best laptops, and have for years, and not in any particularly order, they are Apple and Lenovo, with the latter getting its excellence inherited from IBM when Lenovo took over.
Just like almost every machine branded “ThinkPad” that we’ve put our hands onto, the Yoga 11e offers a super solid very comfortable typing experience, and it’s one you can take to the bank.
Forget too much travel or not enough, because the Yoga 11e is “just right”, and offers the Goldilocks of keyboards.
The mouse could be a little better, and you only get the one trackpad here instead of the rubber nib in the centre of the keyboard like you used to in the good ol’ days.
But Lenovo does pull its weight a little more and provide an extra controller or two.
You already know you have a touchscreen, and that is fairly responsive, but what you also get in the box is one of Lenovo’s Active Pen styluses, allowing you to write on the screen or use it as a sort of mouse, if need be.
There’s even a handy clip to keep the pen attached to the computer, though it does take over a USB port on the machine, so just keep that in mind.
Battery
One positive area is the battery which powers on providing a solid seven to eight hours of battery life.
That’s what we found when using the Yoga 11e for productivity, which means writing, web surfing, and general use, and we suspect if you’re able to push the computer a little more, you’ll wear down the battery significantly.
With that said, the low-end specs might make that a touch difficult, so we’re sticking with the expected even to eight hours.
Not bad at all, Lenovo.
What’s wrong?
Despite the excellence that Lenovo has built into this piece of hardware, there are two glaring issues from our point of view: price and speed.
Price is the first one, and it’s hard to get past because the Lenovo Yoga 11e carries such a high price, sitting at $1539 locally for the privilege of getting one of these well-built bad boys.
Let’s just get something clear: you’re paying for the military spec shell and the fact that this computer can take a beating.
When was the last time you intentionally dropped a laptop? Never?
Because the Yoga 11e can be intentionally dropped from waist height, which means it can be accidentally dropped from waist height also. That’s the accidental situation no one wants to think about but still occasionally happens, particularly in the education space, because we’re talking about kids here.
Kids aren’t necessarily careless with their laptops, but that doesn’t mean they’re filled with care, either, and so if their bag takes a tumble and the machine goes flying out, falling on a carpeted floor or heaven forbid the bumpy asphalt of the outside blacktop basketball courts, you want to know that the money you just spent on a computer isn’t worth precisely zero at the end.
Lenovo’s Yoga 11e is about the only machine we’ve seen this year that you can say that with, providing a solid shell with enough casing around the components and screen to know that this isn’t your ordinary machine. This is something else. Something sturdy and built like the PC equivalent of a tank.
But you have to pay for that privilege, and we suspect that’s a good $500 to $700 in the price tag for this machine, because it’s just so high, it’s hard to think that most of that is innards.
That understanding of how a computer is built also concerns us slightly, because while the processor inside the Yoga 11e isn’t a sluggish performer, the speed of the processor is troubling.
When is the last time you saw a laptop carry a processor speed of lower than one gigahertz?
It’s been some time for us since we saw that, and while processor speed isn’t the be-all end-all in identifying good computers (because processor architecture is a big part), we also haven’t seen such a low end chip in ages.
To Lenovo’s credit, the company has done quite well to optimise the 800MHz processor and the rest of the machine, with the whole thing gelling together with nothing on it.
But this has nothing on it, and so we have to wonder — and worry — what life will be like when a student, or anyone for that matter, actually uses the Yoga 11e for more than just writing and web surfing.
With such a low spec chip, we can’t imagine this machine will feel the same, and we sit here back at GadgetGuy asking why Lenovo didn’t just equip the 11e with something more suitable from Intel’s Core M series.
Conclusion
There aren’t many machines like the Yoga 11e, because while you can find a whole swathe of laptops made for students, finding one that can survive a drop, a fall, a tumble, and an incident that would make any other computer flat out break is a little difficult.
They just don’t exist. We know: we’ve looked.
Lenovo’s ThinkPad Yoga 11e is therefore a shining beacon of hope for students who aren’t necessarily going to treat their laptop with the sort of love and respect it deserves, but it comes with a catch: it’s not a super fast machine.
Despite this, Lenovo has tuned the system quite well, and you’d never really notice or realise that the chip inside was a little under where it probably should be.
That makes the system ideal for youngsters, and ones that you wouldn’t necessarily trust a $300 computer with for fear of severe damage.
Granted, that’s an expensive purchase for a kid — $1539! — but this is durability defined, and at least you’ll be given the peace of mind that the casing and everything inside won’t come flying out.
