Lenovo Yoga 500 review: Short on power

Lenovo’s been on top form with its 2-in-1 hybrids recently, but the Yoga 500 stops that record short. It’s soon to be replaced by the Yoga 510, but this cut-price laptop is still on sale for around £350, making it one of the cheapest 2-in-1s you can currently buy. However, it’s simply not worth the effort, as there are far better laptops out there than the Yoga 500.

It’s a shame, really, as it certainly looks the part of a sleek hybrid laptop. My particular review model had a striking white chassis, and its classy hairline finish offers a significant step-up from the cheaper and rather more plasticky Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200SA.

Display

Take a close look at the 14in display, though, and you’ll see how Lenovo’s managed to keep the cost down. With a resolution of just 1,366 x 768, it’s not the sharpest display out there, and text was rather fuzzy round the edges. Admittedly, the Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200SA also has a 1,366 x 768 resolution, but crams it into a much smaller 11.6in screen, giving it a higher pixel density than the Yoga 500.

The quality of the screen is pretty sub-par, too, as our X-Rite colorimeter showed it was displaying just 57.2% of the sRGB colour gamut, leaving colours looking washed out. It’s also hampered by poor viewing angles and a low peak brightness of 212cd/m2, making it difficult to use outside or in brightly lit rooms.

Keyboard and touchpad

The full-sized keyboard was more promising, as I didn’t have any problems with it during testing. It felt very responsive over long typing sessions, and each key gave a decent amount of tactile feedback.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for its terrible touchpad. Not only is it incredibly unresponsive, but I often found myself wrestling with it in order to get it to do what I wanted. I actually preferred using the touchscreen over the touchpad in the end, as this at least actually registered my finger taps, but this is definitely a laptop that could benefit from the use of a mouse when it’s not folded in half and being used as a tablet.

Performance and battery life

The Yoga 500 has some pretty uninspiring specs, too. Rather than using one of this year’s Core i3 processor, the Yoga 500 is stuck with a two-year-old dual-core 1.9GHz Core i3-4030U chip and just 4GB of RAM. As a result, it was no match for our demanding 4K multimedia benchmarks, so I ran our 1080p multimedia tests instead, which uses the i3-4030U as a reference point. Here it scored 94 overall, which is a little below average for this type of chip but not much.

In real-world use, however, it was still rather sluggish. It took an incredibly long time to boot up on many occasions, with applications taking ages to load as well. It’s definitely one of the slowest Lenovo 2-in-1s I’ve tested recently, but that’s to be somewhat expected given the price. Unsurprisingly, it’s not cut-out for light gaming, either, as even Minecraft saw some pretty drastic frame rate drops below 20fps on numerous occasions.

However, battery life is by far the Yoga 500’s worst attribute. Lasting a measly 2hrs 49mins in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to our predefined level of 170cd/m2, you’ll be hard-pressed to squeeze out enough juice for a morning’s work, let alone a full day, so taking the charger with you is an absolute must.

Ports and connections

It does, at least, have a generous supply of ports, including three USB ports (two of which are USB3), an HDMI output, SD card reader and a combined headphone and microphone jack. There’s even a proper Ethernet port to complement its 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 support.

Verdict

However, that’s of small consolation when the Yoga 500 lacks even a basic amount of stamina. With its sluggish performance and atrocious battery life, I simply can’t recommend it even as a budget 2-in-1 device. There are far better alternatives out there, such as the even cheaper Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200SA, making the Yoga 500 one to avoid at all costs. If you'd rather spend a bit more, check out our regularly updated Best Laptops 2016 article for more of our top picks. 

Lenovo YOGA 500 14-Inch FHD Convertible Laptop (White) - (Intel Core-i3, 4 GB RAM, 1 TB Storage, Intel HD Graphics Card, Windows 10)

£349.95Buy now