Lenovo Yoga 720 A Good Choice For The Budget Conscious

The Lenovo Yoga 720 convertible laptop comes in several shapes and sizes. The best option for most people is probably the 13-inch model, the recipient of an Editors’ Choice award for its feathery weight and balance of features and price. But if you’d like to go even smaller and less expensive, there’s a $649.99 12-inch version, the subject of this review.

- Tom Brant

To keep the price and size down, Lenovo outfits it with barebones components—an Intel Core i3-7100U, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD—that result in a relatively slow machine with scarce room for your multimedia collection but enough power for light web browsing, emails, and word processing. Throw in a high-quality full HD touch display, and you’ve got a versatile, convertible laptop for casual use, albeit one that can’t offer extra computing oomph if you need it.

THIN BEZEL, GOOD DISPLAY

The Yoga 720 rides the thin-bezel wave that began to wash over the high-end ultraportable market a few years ago and shows no sign of breaking any time soon. The bezel, or border around the screen, is quite thin on the sides of the Yoga 720’s 12.5-inch full HD display, but it’s thick enough on top to include a webcam in the normal position at the center of the screen. Compare that with Dell’s Infinity Edge display on the XPS series, which is so thin on all sides that there’s no room for a webcam above the screen. People who use their laptops for video conferencing will much prefer the Yoga 720’s webcam position to the awkwardly placed camera at the lower left corner of Dell XPS 13. The Lenovo’s webcam takes surprisingly non-grainy HD video, even in low light conditions.