Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 first impressions

General

I picked up Yoga 13 from a local hardware store a few days back. It is the best equipped version with Intel i7, 256GB SSD and 8GB ram. See my post on why I ended up with Yoga instead of Twist or Helix here if you are interested.
I wanted the one with as much as possible storage capacity, since it will be used by everyone in my family and each of us have some stuff in Skydrive etc so 128GB version seemed a bit small. However, it seems to be possible to upgrade the SSD but the price difference seemed to make it worth to begin with the larger option. The drive has a lot of partitions on it, which probably not all are useful. I will probably wipe the drive at some point and do a fresh install of Win8, but let’s see when I have the time to do that.
In general Yoga seems like an impressive piece of hardware. Build quality seems very good and the 1600x900 IPS screen looks marvelous. The kids also love it and one of the first things I did was to configure a suitable maximum amount of time per day for them to reserve at least some slices of time for me as well

Yoga as an ultrabook

Yoga is a pretty slick package for a 13,3” laptop, it I fairly light and thin but yet rather solidly built machine. Having used to traditional ThinkPad line of Lenovos in the past, there are two notable differences you need to be aware of.
First, the keyboard is nowhere near the touch and feel of, say, T420 that is my everyday software development machine. The keys have very small amount of movement and thus they feel a bit numb. Also the keyboard layout is a bit different which takes some getting used to. However, this seems to be the norm in all laptops the size of an ultrabook nowadays so you need to sacrifice something to get that thin outlook.
Second, Yoga does NOT have a TrackPoint mouse (that integrated red stick between GHB keys), only a TouchPad as all other ultrabooks on the planet. Oh well, another compromise…

Yoga as a tablet

Yoga can be used as a tablet as well. The screen turns 360 degrees behind the keyboard (or you can turn it halfway into “tent” or “stand” mode). It feels a bit odd at first that you feel the keyboard on the back of the “tablet”, but you get used to it. No worries, the keyboard is disabled in this mode and there are no accidental key presses.
It has happened a few times that in the tablet mode the screen orientation (portrait/landscape) sensor has not worked correctly and I had to put it in sleep and wake it to recognize orientation changes. 98% of the time it seems to work correctly but there may be some driver issues or some other problem that causes that. Update: I know about the screen orientation lock button, it was not activated.
I have found myself using the tablet almost always in landscape orientation. It feels very tall in portrait orientation due to the 16:9 screen. Reading a long text is the only exception, that seems to be ok in portrait orientation.

Summary

Yoga 13 is a fantastic device! The build quality is very good and the idea of different modes (laptop/tablet/tent/stand) is surprisingly natural. It is our family’s favorite PC from now on!