Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 260 Review - Battery Life, Performance and Verdict Review

Lenovo Yoga 260 – Performance

When it comes to computing performance, the Yoga 260 is typical of a slim and light laptop – which is to say it’s great for most day-to-day tasks, but will struggle a little with super-intensive workloads such as video editing or 3D rendering. If all you’re doing is web browsing, email, word processing, watching video and just the occasional bit of photo or video editing then it’s absolutely fine.

Putting that into numbers, the Yoga 260 scored 2,698 in PCMark 8 and 6,580 in the Geekbench 3 multi-core test; the similarly equipped Dell XPS 13 scored 5,844 in the same test.

It’s also clear to see the benefits of the upgrade from using an Intel Core M processor, as used in the Asus ZenBook UX305CA, which scored only 4,817 in Geekbench. Meanwhile, you’ll achieve double the performance from larger, more powerful laptops.

When it comes to gaming and other 3D tasks, this machine isn’t exactly a powerhouse. Nonetheless, it will run most games, although it will be at low detail settings and low frame rates. The Yoga 260 scored 52,398 in 3DMark: Ice Storm, which compares to 35,732 for the Asus ZenBook UX305CA. Meanwhile, a proper gaming laptop will achieve 150,000 points or more.

There are drawbacks to this power, though. The Yoga 260 suffers real issues when it comes to cooling, with the fans frequently spinning up to create a distracting amount of noise.

Initially, this seemed to be as a result of the preinstalled McAfee anti-virus software making the CPU work extra hard. However, even after it was turned off, the Yoga 260 regularly became noisy. That said, it at least remained silent during an hour of watching Netflix, which is arguably the most crucial moment for it to do so.

Lenovo Yoga 260 – Battery Life

All too often ultraportable laptops are let down by poor battery life, but not so with the Yoga 260. Managing 7hrs 58mins in our PowerMark test, it’s within touching distance of its competitors. A few rivals out there will hit the 10-hour mark, but eight hours is good-going and will be enough to get through a working day.

We tested the Yoga 260 with the screen set to 40% brightness but then upon realising this was only 65nits we ran it again at 70%, which equates to around 150nits. Either way it made little difference to the result, though it may be possible to squeeze over nine hours out of this machine if you really go to town on turning background tasks off and reducing the brightness further.

Meanwhile an hour of watching Netflix resulted in the battery only dropping by 12%, which again extrapolates out to just over eight hours battery life.

Should I buy the Lenovo Yoga 260?

In most regards, Lenovo has absolutely nailed the Yoga 260. It’s a unique but appealing combination of excellent hybrid and competent business machine, providing a decent laptop experience while also possessing the versatility to work in a variety of touchscreen configurations.

Add in the built-in stylus, great build quality, largely excellent keyboard, solid performance and decent battery life, and you’re onto a bit of a winner. In terms of raw specification, there are many cheaper laptops around, but none with the versatility of the Yoga 260.

However, for those whose work regularly requires reasonably accurate colours, the screen on the Yoga 260 isn’t really up to the task. In fact, even those who regularly find themselves watching video on their laptops will appreciate the vast chasm of quality between this laptop and a device such as the Dell XPS 13.

Plus, if you share my irritations with the keyboard then that’s one more tick in the wrong box and those noisy fans are a further mark on its card.

Verdict

Lenovo narrowly misses the mark here: the Yoga 260 is close to being the ideal business-orientated convertible laptop but a mediocre-quality screen means it just falls short of the bigtime.

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