Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8 Review: Two-in-one thin and light laptop done right

Pros:
– Phenomenal OLED display with touch capabilities
– Solid performance considering the footprint
– Top-notch built quality
– Subtle and understated styling that looks and feels great
– Keyboard is a joy to use
– Foldable hinge feels strong and sturdy

Cons:
– Battery life could have been slightly better
– Could have used another USB-A port

Price: Rs 1,62,690
Rating: 4.25/5

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When it comes to thin and light laptops, the primary objective is to provide users with a remarkably portable device that not only exudes an attractive appearance but also delivers an exceptionally satisfying user experience. Add to that the 2-in-1 form factor and what you have in your hands is a cracker of a formula.

Unfortunately, the trade-off associated with most slim and lightweight laptops often involves sacrificing performance and, at times, even compromising on battery life to an extent that would deter any professional or prosumer user from considering such a device as a viable option.

Enter the Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8, which represents a welcome departure from this common narrative. This particular thin and light notebook offers a robust performance, making it a versatile machine suitable for everyday tasks and, impressively, well-equipped to handle more demanding operations like video and photo editing. Moreover, it boasts all the characteristic features one expects from a traditional thin and light device: an exquisite and aesthetically pleasing design, an almost weightless build, and a robust construction.

Lenovo’s Yoga series of 2-in-1 laptops has long enjoyed a well-established reputation as one of the top choices for individuals in search of versatile, Windows-based laptops that cater to creative endeavours. These laptops are renowned for their signature convertible design, characterized by 360-degree hinges, touchscreens, and even the inclusion of a stylus in the package.

In our comprehensive testing of the Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8, we will delve into every facet of this convertible laptop from Lenovo and assess whether it merits your time, and your hard earned money.

Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8 Review: Design and build quality
When I first got my hands on the Lenovo Yoga 7, my initial impression was how sturdy it felt. To be honest, I had some reservations before testing it out. I thought Lenovo might have cut corners on the build quality, perhaps focusing more on the hinge and the screen. But boy, was I mistaken.

The Yoga 7 is made using aluminium for both its top and bottom, giving it a substantial feel in terms of weight. When you press on various parts of the laptop, you can tell it’s been engineered with precision, showing minimal flex and instilling confidence in its everyday use.

Our review unit sports the eye-catching Tidal Teal colour, although the Yoga 7 is also available in the more understated Storm Grey.

The laptop tips the scales at 1.5 kilograms and boasts a robust build, giving it the feel of a sturdy tank. It features sleek, rounded edges and a bead-blasted finish on the lid, keyboard deck, and the underside of the chassis. These rounded edges ensure that there are no uncomfortable hard edges when you rest your palms on the laptop, making it equally comfortable to hold when using it in tablet mode.

We really like the laptop’s clean and minimalist design. However, it’s important to note that the Tidal Teal finish on our unit has a tendency to attract fingerprints and is quite sensitive to oils. So, if this is a concern for you, the grey option might be the way to go.

One interesting design choice with the Yoga 7 is the rounded edges all around the laptop. Unlike most laptops that have chamfered, squared-off edges, the decision to go with rounded edges actually enhances the comfort of holding the laptop on the sides.

And, of course, we can’t overlook one of the Yoga 7’s standout features: its hinge.

In our real-world usage, the 360-degree hinge consistently felt robust and reliable. I never encountered any issues with it feeling too loose or too stiff when transitioning between its different modes. Thanks to this hinge, you can effortlessly switch the Yoga 7 between laptop mode, stand mode, and tablet mode.

You also get a ton of connectivity options. For ports, you get a full-sized USB 3.0 / 3.1 Gen1 port, two Thunderbolt ports with USB-C Power Delivery (PD), one HDMI, a 3.5mm combo jack for audio, and a microSD card reader. For wireless connectivity, you get WiFi 6E, and BlueTooth 5.1

The only design aspect that left me a bit frustrated was the time it took to figure out how to properly stow the included Precision Pen with the laptop using the provided holder.

Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8 Review: Display
The laptop Lenovo provided for review boasts a 14-inch OLED display with a resolution of 2880×1800, with a 90Hz refresh rate, which gives an extra smoothness to the visual experience.

The display is undeniably breathtaking. As one would expect from an OLED panel, it delivers incredibly deep, true blacks, and the colours are exceptionally vivid. The added advantage of the 90Hz refresh rate elevates the overall smoothness of the visuals, although it does have a slightly higher impact on battery life. Also, the display is Dolby Vision certified, so you know you have a solid panel in your hands

In terms of colour accuracy, this display stands out, covering 100% of the DCI-P3 colour space, which makes content consumption a joy on this thing. While the brightness falls just short of Lenovo’s promised 400 nits, it remains an excellent screen overall.

Whether you’re using the laptop in tablet mode, navigating the screen through taps and swipes, or making handwritten notes, the 14-inch display offers a remarkable combination of expansive colour representation, decent brightness, and the characteristic true black excellence of OLED screens. To add to its appeal, it also supports Dolby Vision HDR, further enhancing the visual experience.

In fact, the display is so solid that I wouldn’t hesitate to use it for color-grading my photos or videos. It consistently shines, providing a superior visual experience, regardless of your activity on the laptop.

Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8 Review: Keyboard and trackpad
The Lenovo Yoga 7 continues to impress with its keyboard and touchpad. Let’s start with the keyboard – it features a well-organized standard layout that’s quite user-friendly.

The chiclet-styled keys on this keyboard offer a good amount of travel, and they strike a nice balance, avoiding the common pitfalls of being either too sticky or too soft. This makes typing a consistently comfortable experience for your day-to-day tasks. You also get LED backlighting for the keyboard, which comes with two brightness levels.

Below the keyboard, there’s a generously sized touchpad without any physical buttons, and it strikes the right balance in terms of size, avoiding the awkwardness of being overly large. The glass surface of the touchpad feels excellent, offering ample space for smooth navigation. Each press on the touchpad results in a satisfying click, and it handles multitouch gestures with ease. The touchpad’s accuracy and tracking capabilities are top-notch, to the point where it seamlessly blends into your user experience, making it effortless and enjoyable to use.

In my testing, I had no issues using both the left and right clicks, and I never encountered any missed presses.

Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8 Review: Webcam and speakers
The Lenovo Yoga 7 is equipped with an FHD webcam positioned at the top, and we found it to be more than just serviceable. It’s a standard 2.1MP 16:9 camera, allowing you to capture 1080p videos, which is useful for remote work situations. The footages shout using the built-in webcam isn’t anything amazing, but they do get the job done pretty well.

It also comes with IR and a privacy shutter, which is a noteworthy feature, particularly in today’s world of concerns about hacking and potential surveillance.

Coming to the audio department, the laptop boasts a stereo speaker setup that delivers a pretty solid experience, and for good reason. After all, it is tuned as per Dolby Atmos’ specifications.

The audio was surprisingly rich and offered high-quality sound even at reasonably loud volumes. It’s a significant advantage that the Yoga 7’s speakers are smartly placed on either side of the keyboard, directed towards the user for an immersive sound experience.

Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8 Review: Performance
The laptop I received from Lenovo packs some impressive hardware under the hood. It boasts a Core i7 1360P processor, 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM at 5200MTs, and a 512GB PCIe 4 SSD. The Core i7 1360P is unique, featuring 4 high-performance cores and 8 efficiency cores.

Lenovo provides users with the Lenovo Vantage app, offering three distinct profiles for performance settings: Battery Saver, Intelligent Cooling, and High Performance. In our benchmark tests and measurements, we opted for the High-Performance mode to put this machine through its paces.

While the Intel Core i7-1360P might not appear exceptionally powerful on paper, it impresses by delivering excellent performance. The Core i7 1360P is unique, featuring 4 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores. This processor performs remarkably well in various synthetic benchmarks, consistently achieving high scores. The performance cores can reach an impressive 5GHz, while the efficiency cores boost up to 3.70GHz. Consequently, the Core i7-1360P excels in both light, single-threaded tasks and more demanding multi-threaded tasks, which is a pleasant surprise.

Under heavier workloads, the laptop does experience some heating, but it remains within manageable levels. Lenovo’s cooling design for the Yoga 7 effectively prevents thermal throttling even during peak thermal conditions.

Lenovo had pledged a significant 15 per cent boost in productivity performance for laptops equipped with 28W CPUs in the P-series, and it’s quite remarkable to see this promise fulfilled, especially for a laptop of this size. With such a significant increase in productivity, you can confidently expect the laptop to handle demanding tasks and multitasking with ease. Intel’s improvements in the 13th-gen processors in this laptop are indeed noteworthy.

The laptop’s graphics performance is also praiseworthy, particularly when you consider its slim and lightweight build. It excels in general tasks, such as streaming media and managing light photo and video editing assignments. Thanks to Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics, it might not be the top choice for gaming or intensive 3D rendering. However, for all other tasks, you can expect it to perform seamlessly and handle them without any issues.

We also decided to test its gaming capabilities, even though this isn’t a gaming laptop. As for gaming, although it isn’t exactly a gaming laptop. We played Valorant and Apex Legends and to our surprise, it managed the games quite admirably at low settings. There was only a slight instance of screen tearing and virtually no noticeable lag from the laptop.

Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8 Review: Battery
The Yoga 7 comes with a 71Wh LiPo 4-cell battery. The battery life on the Yoga 9i is pretty respectable. On average, I found that the laptop fell just short of 8 hours of battery life during my regular usage which involved a lot of internet browsing, writing documents, and editing photos, with the screen set at 70-80 per cent brightness. You can expect the laptop to go for 9 hours or so on a single charge if you remove it from high-performance mode and dim the screen a little.

The good thing though, is that with just 15-20 minutes of charging you get enough juice to go for another 2 hours or so.

While this battery life may appear decent on paper, it’s worth noting that some other laptops in this price range offer far worse battery performance.

Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8 Review: Verdict
The Lenovo Yoga 7 certainly shines, and while it does have some minor drawbacks, they are relatively insignificant. One of these is the absence of built-in pen storage, which means you’ll need to rely on the included case for that.

That being said, the Lenovo Yoga 7 presents an impressively sleek and feature-rich design. While it would be nice to see longer battery life and greater flexibility with the added function keys, there’s very little to fault with this device. Its outstanding design, stunning OLED display, and overall performance more than meet expectations.

All things considered, the Lenovo Yoga 7 14IRL8 is a highly reliable choice for individuals seeking a 2-in-1 laptop that offers an exceptional screen, impressive performance, and solid battery life. This device also features a touchscreen and includes a stylus, making it a well-rounded option for a variety of tasks.