General Usage
I have been using the ThinkPad X1 Yoga as my main laptop for almost 3 weeks now and I am really enjoying it. Typically I try and escape the office 2-3 times a week and work from a coffee shop. The X1 Yoga has enabled me to take my work with me and be productive in a very small and light form factor, but is powerful enough that working from a laptop is just as productive as work from the office.
The biggest thing with any laptop is the keyboard and how comfortable it is to type on. Lenovo and the ThinkPad brand specifically have always had some of the best keyboards in the laptop industry. The keyboard on the X1 Yoga is no different, while the keys only have a travel distance of 1.67 mm, I found them perfect for my type of typing. The touchpad is very easy to use a well, it is pretty big too, which is nice. I really did not need an external mouse with the X1 Yoga.
Now I’ve never been a stylus person. I like typing on a PC, but since there is one included with the X1 Yoga I had to try it out. You can use Lenovo’s WriteIt application or any application that accepts pen input. It worked quite well and can easily be used for taking notes, I could see this being particularly useful at events where I normally take notes in notebooks. Throw the X1 Yoga in tablet mode and take notes easily!
The keyboard itself does have backlighting, which is white and only has two brightness levels. At its highest level it is more than bright enough where I can see the keys when I am typing in the dark. It is also nice that you can turn the lights off if you want to save battery or just don’t want them on.
Battery life is something the keeps getting better over time and the X1 Yoga is no exception to this. Lenovo claims around 11 hours of “normal” use, I am not sure what their “normal” use entails, but my normal use was writing and posting thing on the site, editing photos, listening to Spotify, etc. In my testing I was able to go between 7 and 8 hours, which is quite impressive. That means I can take the X1 Yoga on a flight with me from New York City to San Francisco and still have some juice left once I land!
One thing that I did want to mention as well as that the X1 Yoga is not loaded with a ton of bloatware, you know all the unnecessary applications that come pre-installed on laptops. You have a few Lenovo apps, and McAfee Internet security.
