Review: Lenovo Yoga 900 2-in-1

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The line between consumer and work PCs has blurred, as evidenced by Lenovo's ultra-sleek 2-in-1 Yoga 900 laptop.

With this 13-inch PC, Lenovo shows why it's a 2-in-1 king of the hill.

The standout feature for this Lenovo laptop is its ultra-svelte design, its slim watchband-style hinge and the silver unibody chassis.

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The Lenovo Yoga 900 weighs-in at 2.8 pounds and has a starting price of $1,200 for the Core i7 model.

A big part of the Yoga 900's wow-factor is its gorgeous 3,200 x 1,800 touch screen display. This 13.3-inch display, that is just shy of being 4K, matches Apple's Retina technology as well as Microsoft's PixelSense high-resolution screen.

The only ding we found is the glossy coating that tended to catch a lot of reflected light and attracted a lot of fingerprints.

An advanced display feature called "paper display" optimizes the screen for reading long stretches of text and PDFs.

Another standout feature that illustrates Lenovo leadership in the 2-in-1 space is this laptop's watchband hinge. The hinge is stiff enough to stay in place when tapping on the screen and doesn't wobble when typing on your lap. And unlike competing 2-in-1 laptop's CRN has tested, the Lenovo 900 folds all the way back where the keyboard aligns nicely with the display.

In fact, it's Lenovo's excellent hinge that really allows this notebook to be a full-time laptop and a part-time tablet.

There is room for improvement with Lenovo's keyboard. Lenovo's smallish Shift key sometimes tripped us up typing. That went double with the Backspace key. Several times we lost our typing rhythm searching with our pinky for the right key.

The Yoga 900 was noticeably faster last year's Yoga 3 Pro powered by Intel's slower Core M processor.

In CRN's benchmark testing 2.5GHZ Intel Core i7-6500U CPU matched similar benchmark scores of Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro and Microsoft's new Surface Book running Intel's Core i5 CPU that are similarly priced.

The Yoga 900 lasted just over 9 hours in our battery test playing looping videos. That was better than Lenovo's own rating of 9 hours flat.

This latest Lenovo Yoga hybrid is a giant leap forward compared to earlier incarnations of the Yoga 2-in-1 family.