I own a lot of technology. Technology, computing equipment in particular, is something I personally hold as a priority and I am therefore happy to do things like drop a hundred dollars or so on an Android tablet whose main function is checking to see if I have anything in my Gmail account, and run SharePoint and Exchange on my own server in my home, and use several different laptops, each with its own function.
So, when the Lenovo Yoga 11 (with Windows RT) went on sale at Lenovo's refurbished products store at a significant discount, I was sure I had to have one. For a little bit of background, I bought a Microsoft Surface RT on October 27th 2012, just a day after they were available at retail. I chose that particular machine because I wanted something with a good keyboard that was capable of long battery life, and the almost fully functional copies of Word/Excel/OneNote helped a lot. In ten years when Windows RT is a curiosity, it also helps that the Surface RT will be seen as the marquee device for the platform.
The Machine
But on the sidelines, the massively overpriced Yoga 11 was always slightly more interesting to me. Firstly, Lenovo's keyboards are excellent, and the IdeaPad series tends to get some of the runoff keyboard technology from the ThinkPad line, which the company acquired from IBM in 2005. The Yoga has a bigger, slightly more readable screen, a regular trackpad, two USB ports, a full-sized SDXC reader, and shares a power connector with several of Lenovo's bigger products. This is all in addition to the nVidia TEGRA 3 CPU/GPU combo, 2 gigs of ram, 64 gigabytes of storage, and the everyday pantheon of wireless networking standards.
And, when it was new, the Yoga was entirely too overpriced. The RT-based machine which is best described by The Verge as 2012's take on the "netbook" idea was $800 when it was new. If the price didn't keep you from buying one, availability did. It spent most of its life time not listed for sale, and I don't believe it was ever sold in a single retail establishment. It certainly didn't show up anywhere I've been in the past year. At just shy of $300, the refurbished unit I bought is a much better deal. At this price and with availability in retail stores, a year ago, the things would have flown right off the shelves. I wouldn't have been able to get one because they were sold out.
The Hardware
The Yoga 11 RT is a solid feeling device. It is very small compared to my two main laptops, superslab and eisbrecher, but it is pretty big compared to my iPad and it's marginally bigger than the Surface RT with one of its keyboards attached. I wasn't too worried about this though because for the most part, when I take the Yoga 11 with me, I am only taking one device. This serves as both a tablet for tablet tasks such as Netflix and Kindle, and a laptop for writing. Its other physical aspects are pretty nice. I absolutely love the power adapter, and given that Lenovo is switching to the new rectangular connector across its product line, it's reasonably likely that I'll be getting more like it in the future. One of my biggest complaints about the Surface RT continues to be that the power adapter falls out of the system if you so much as look at it oddly. It gets worse if you ever take your Surface anywhere and the gristle from the bottom of your bag gets into the port.
I wrote the better part of a novel (and have probably spilled tens of thousands of words worth of chatting, forum posts, and blog entries as well) on it and have found that in reality, the keyboard is pretty average. To be honest, it's disappointing in comparison both to a traditional ThinkPad keyboard, such as the current USB UltraNav keyboard modeled after the ThinkPad T420/X220, and the keyboard my ThinkPad T400 has on it. It's even pretty bad compared to the Sony Vaio keyboard, and for what it is, I even think the Microsoft Type Cover is a better keyboard. The trackpad is far better than on my Vaio, but I significantly appreciate the inclusion of a button that disables it. I think this has at least as much to do with my personal typing style, but trackpads have always gotten in my way.
The Software
The software on the machine is still Windows RT and to be perfectly honest, the most I can say about Windows RT is that in the 1990s, a boxed copy of Office for Mac cost $495. That copy of Office included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and "Mail." You had to spend another $1000 to get a Mac, and if that $1000 was on a Quadra 605, you also had to buy a keyboard, monitor, and whatever else you wanted. Without accounting for inflation, Windows RT devices are just a great deal, and are a great way to get a second computer, a computer for a new user, or a student to get a computer that has a long battery life and a copy of Office.
Windows RT is nice, but its marquee feature really is the fact that Microsoft Office 2013 comes on the device and that you can browse flash drives and use desktop Internet Explorer 10 to go to web sites that have complex functionality like uploading attachments. If I'd had this machine in 2006 when I started at the university, I would absolutely have been doing all of my homework on it. In part because of the solid state storage (slow eMMC though it may be) and in part because of how well-locked the operating system is, I haven't noticed any degradation in performance at all, on either of my Windows RT devices. From last year to this one, they've each gotten faster in use if anything.
And, I think it says a lot about Microsoft's efforts with the "New User Interface" that the best thing I can find about Windows RT is that it has Office and Remote Desktop Connection on it. On the Surface RT, I made an effort to start using and investigating RT-based apps and games. On the Yoga, I removed some of the apps I never use and have been extremely selective about what I install. I use this like a laptop, and have been careful to warn people that it's not suitable as their new computer unless they want a laptop that only has Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and the Remote Desktop Client on it. I can only hope that at some point in the future, there's an RT app using the new interface that's compelling enough to make me give up my desktop ways.
The focused environment really helps though. I live my life in Word, Excel, and OneNote anyway, and Internet Explorer is a totally different (better) beast than it was seven years ago. And, although I'm not often away from outlets, I don't like carrying power adapters. I can truly run the Yoga all day long at work without being on battery. If I were sitting in a conference room on campus, remoted into a terminal server, I wouldn't be worried about battery life at all. And, I would probably have my phone and a mouse plugged in. I haven't done any formalized testing of the battery life, but The Verge's review indicates that it gets nine to twelve hours while viewing Flash videos (on YouTube or using the Spotify Web Player, for example) and working in Office applications.
Twelve hours is a lot. When I bought my ThinkPad T400 in 2009, I paid hundreds extra for two very large batteries and disabled lots of things, including wireless networking in order to achieve my personal all-time record of a sixteen-hour day. In the brave new world of ARM-based computers that have desktop environments, and now with the Bay Trail atoms that are both performant and energy efficient, it's very freeing not to have to worry about bringing a power adapter, or avoiding the use of features of my computer in order to make it through a day. Long-term, I don't know how long the battery will stay in this condition. Traditionally, PCs have had their batteries wear out very quickly, with many models from the major vendors becoming desk-bricks in two years or less. I solved this problem on my ThinkPad T400 by buying a new main battery for it after three years. This remains a question on a lot of types of devices, though. My original iPad from 2010 has been holding up well in the battery department, but we don't really have Nexus and Surface/RT tablets from 2010 to compare.
The form factor is really interesting. As mentioned before, I use it like a laptop. It's my netbook, CULV, or 11-inch MacBook Air. I have opened it up all the way to show people that the system is capable of doing so, but I have never had a reason to actually use it that way. The screen does not work with the iPad stylus I have, for whatever reason, so attempting to hand-write notes into OneNote (a personal holy grail of mine) was out of the question, and I have desktop monitors available for things like movie-watching. All of my reading material is split between the iPad and the Surface RT, so I haven't done too much reading with it, and I have elected not to install any games on it which might be best played with the system folded open. Somebody who bought it to use as a tablet as well as a laptop (or maybe primarily as a tablet) would certainly make much more use of those modes than I did. Although, it's worth mentioning that there are probably better purely tablet devices. The Surface RT is smaller and more portable, and the kickstand takes less desk space than presentation mode on the Yoga, just as one example. The Dell XPS 10 is also cheaper and has a different processor/graphics configuration, so it may have different graphics performance properties, just as another example.
Performance
As alluded to several times: performance is adequate. Windows RT seems to get better with every patch that Microsoft releases, and an Office app or two and an Internet Explorer tab or six fits surprisingly well in the system's two gigabytes of memory. Objectively, it's not bringing home any first-place trophies. Its direct, intel-based successor the Yoga 11S is a much better system in terms of raw performance, and if you're going to open thirty browser tabs, this system is going to be a waste of your time. If you can work within the constraints of two gigs of ram, however, you'll get a lot done. It's great when you're working on a particular task. I often use it when I am novel-writing, or taking notes in a meeting, or researching one particular thing, recording my findings in a document or OneNote notebook and then finishing.
On the performance note, however – the wireless is not very good. I have had inconsistent luck getting it to join networks at all, and this system is affected by one of my biggest gripes about Windows RT at large, which is that it would have been very nice of Microsoft to leave Ethernet support in. With Ethernet support, I could take advantage of the fact that the yoga has two USB ports, just in case some situation comes up. Like most of the things about the system, the badness of its networking hardware is really just middle-of-the-road. It's not unusably bad, and it has gotten better with updates, but it's not as good as the wireless performance of almost anything else I own, and it is probably the only device I have that doesn't reliably connect to my own home network.
Wireless works well enough if you're near an access point and I had good luck with it in public places, but if I take the Yoga to the other end of my own home, then although it claims it has a very strong signal, there will be a huge lag in doing anything over my wireless network and it may not connect or stay connected (to things like a remote desktop session.) This doesn't necessarily hinder my usage of it as a writing computer, but it puts a damper on my doing things like connecting an external hard disk and using it to transfer files to my network server.
The touchscreen is also pretty close to average, in terms of touch screens I have used. It is a pretty standard capacitive screen, with the one odd quirk that the capacitive stylus I have simply does not work on it. At all. I have no idea, but that is its only crime. It otherwise errs on the "good" side of average and for the most part, I have had good luck controlling desktop elements using the touchscreen, which is good because I often disable the touchpad and just want to select an option on the Word 2013 toolbar or switch from IE to Word while doing research or gathering links for a blog post. Because I often have a mouse connected, I leave Word in the "mouse" mode and I am running Windows at 100% UI scaling and haven't had any problems. That having been said, I have literally never tried to type on the on-screen keyboard with this device. I suspect that it'll be slightly different from the Surface RT, just because it is slightly bigger. That might be good or bad, depending.
In Conclusion
Overall, I like the system a lot. It is a good task computer and with its flexible but not wild i/o and storage expansion options, and the flexibility of the desktop (compared to Android and iOS tablets), it earns the distinction of being one of the computers that I think would be most successful and long-lasting if I sent it back in time to go live with young-me. Young me would be nigh on incapable of destroying anything in the operating system, and I have no problem believing that the software on this machine will stay running well forever. (And I also have no problems believing Microsoft will keep it updated for the forseeable future.) Windows RT is also just flexible enough that it's not boring or impossible to use. Microsoft has left some odd things in, such as PowerShell, and the desktop interface for the Contacts data store.
If you can get your hands on one and need something to take to classes for the next four to eight years, keep a daily journal, or transfer files between memory cards and USB hard disks (a sore point with me and the Surface RT) then this machine is sure to please. I don't think it'll be the best computer you've ever owned, but I do think that most people would have no problem using this as their "laptop" for a few generations' worth of desktops or bigger, non-portable laptops.
I've had my Yoga for two or three months now, and I think in retrospect, what I expected or wanted was a ThinkPad X131e with an ARM processor and touchscreen. In fact, if Lenovo could build me an X131e with ARM and Windows RT, I'd be highly appreciative. That device is fat enough that Lenovo would have no problems stuffing a full day or so of batteries in it, and it would benefit significantly in my book from the TrackPoint and a regular ThinkPad keyboard. Three USB ports would also let me connect two storage devices and a mouse, or a mouse, a storage device, and a hypothetical Ethernet adapter (or a printer or scanner) – but I think this is just a case of "give a mouse a mile" and people who get used to laptops with four or five USB ports are always the first to ask for a laptop with six or seven of them.
The Verdict
The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 (with Windows RT) earns a Cory rating of "perfectly acceptable." The main reason I'll remember this computer in ten years is because I used it so much. To me, it represents Windows RT's capability to do serious work, and when Windows RT gets updated to 8.1 and Outlook comes on board, and Microsoft improves their own pantheon of New Interface applications, I'll be re-evaluating the types of things it is good for. There's a very high likelihood that I'll continue to use it the same way I already do, but with desktop Outlook instead of OWA in an IE10 tab.
Today, there are so many computing devices and technology is moving so quickly that I think many people are a bit too quick to write off something that's perfectly acceptable. We're so busy looking for the next big thing that it strikes us as odd or boring when something comes along that has the ability to serve our needs for a long time. If you're looking for a small computer that you can use to work on documents, do some web browsing, and also do some tablet tasks, the Yoga 11 RT will be perfectly acceptable. Microsoft has a lot of money, and this is literally a locked down port of their desktop operating system and cash cow office suite, so it is likely to continue receiving security and feature updates for the forseeable future. The only things keeping me from predicting that I'll personally still be using mine for word processing and spreadsheets in another three to five years are the fact that I'm personally very technology-restless, and the issue of the sealed battery.