My Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro Review

I’ve had my Yoga 2 Pro now for about a couple of weeks now and decided to put up a review. Before I got this thing I read a bazillion articles and watched hours of Youtube videos. So I was well informed before I purchased this machine. So I’m not going regurgitate the same crap here for you. That’s what Google is for. No, I’m going to write about what zero review sites have mentioned.

I came from a Lenovo X1 carbon running Ubuntu. I wanted a Windows machine because frankly I don’t like the direction Ubuntu is heading and I was sick of the compromises. I can’t stand OSX for development (I’ll write a post about that later).  I’m a full stack Web Developer (Webmaster) where I do it all. Front End, Back End, Server and marketing. I need a machine that can handle everything that I throw at her. Photoshop, Phpstorm, Sublime Text 3 beta, Filezilla, ConEmu, while running 5 other apps for SEO (xenu, etc). While I stuck with windows 7 vs Windows 8 with the 8.1 update I finally ready to give Windows 8 a shot. Boy. Once you get the right hardware Windows 8 is fantastic.

I went with the Yoga 2 Pro because I wanted another ultrabook with ssd, great resolution screen and a great keyboard. While I wish that I could have picked up another x1 I wanted a convertible thingy to give Windows 8 a full run for it’s money. I’m glad I did. My overall impression of this machine is amazing build quality. Zero give on the keyboard, fantastic keyboard and excellent screen resolution. So I’m really happy with it. Now it’s time to address the title of my post and what’s missing from all the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro reviews out there.

Touchpad

The responsiveness is on par with my MacBook Pro. Yes it’s light years ahead of where Windows was. The pain points are primarily two things.

1. Lenovo for some sick joke of a reason decided to turn on natural scrolling by default with no way of switching it. Yes scrolling is backwards. The only way to change it is by removing the Synaptic driver from Lenovo and replacing it with the generic one. The problem with doing this is that when in tablet mode you loose the ability to have the touchpad turn off. Which is a big pain and honestly I’ve been using tablet mode a lot. So I decided to stick it out and live with it.

2. 2 finger tap to right click does not work. You have to physically click in the lower right-hand corner to get right click to function. There used to be a registry hack that worked with Windows 8 but (from what I read in the Lenovo forums) you loose that hack in 8.1. To fix this I installed a handy little app called TwoFingerScroll. So that fixed that.

Screen Resolution

3200×1800. Yes 3200×1800 sounds great on paper, but in practice it sucks. When you have an app that’s not optimized for this resolution you can’t see crap. Like the command line. Or photoshop. Or Phpstorm. For the past 2 weeks I’ve been tweaking the resolution in order to make it comfortable and so far I’m sticking with 1900×1080.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome looks and acts like shit. This is more of a Chrome thing but the fonts look blurry no matter what resolution that I set it to and I’m getting whacky touchpad behavior. Like scrolling resizes the page and double tapping has a mind of it’s own. So I’ve been using Internet Explorer. Yes I’ve been using IE and actually like it so much it’s my main browser right now. If I could get password sync between desktop IE’s I’d switch full time and use Chrome for development.

Performance

This machine flies. Fast is an understatement. I have Windows 8.1 update 1 on this machine and it’s so fast I do the same task twice because I missed it. This happens a lot with explorer. Opening files and apps is blazingly fast. I haven’t had one hiccup, force close or minor/major issue with this machine.

Tablet Mode

The most intriguing part of the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro is the fact it has 3 different screen orientations. One is tablet mode, the other is laptop mode and the third is what I call Youtube mode. I use all 3 modes extensively. I tend to use tablet mode while I read a book every night. I honestly thought that I wouldn’t use the touchscreen that much but to my dismay I can’t live without it now.

While your mileage may vary this has been my experience with my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro. This is by far the best machine I’ve ever owned.

Tags

Windows 8