A cracker of a thin-and-light laptop with some serious bite – Firstpost

Pros
– Phenomenal OLED display with Dolby Vision
– Solid performance from the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor
– Solid built quality
– Great sound speakers with Dolby Atmos support
– Simple and understated design
– Great typing experience

Cons
– Could have used a faster, 90Hz display
– Lacks a fingerprint scanner
– A card slot would have been a great inclusion

Price: Rs 1,04,999 for the tested variant
Rating: 4.5/5

Lenovo has been delivering one smash hit after the other recently when it comes to thin-and-lights, and their latest, Yoga Slim 7i, is no different. Designing a slim and light ultrabook is tough engineering work. It has to be super portable, look sleek, and cannot afford to compromise with performance.

In this aspect, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i really shines. It effortlessly handled our everyday office tasks like video editing, photo editing, and lots of writing without any issues. What makes it particularly impressive is that it’s one of the first laptops to come with Intel’s new Core Ultra processors, specifically the Core Ultra 7 155H.

Lenovo’s newest thin and light notebook delivers strong performance, which makes it a truly versatile choice for daily tasks and surprisingly capable for demanding jobs like video and photo editing. And thanks to Intel’s new onboard Arc graphics, it has some pretty decent graphical performance, to the extent that you can play some light games like Rocket League and Counter-Strike. Make no mistake, this is a cracker of a laptop.

However, there are some issues, naturally. For example, you only get a 60Hz display, which handicaps the beautiful OLED display that it comes with. But do such shortcomings truly sour the experience that the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i promises? Let’s find out.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 2024 Review: Design and build quality
The Yoga Slim 7i strikes a perfect balance between style and functionality. Weighing just 1.4 kg, it’s super light and slim, making it easy to carry around. The sleek Luna Grey aluminium body feels premium and sturdy, giving the laptop a high-end touch.

Unlike most other slim-and-lights laptops that can be a bit flashy, the Yoga Slim 7i opts for a more subtle design with a matte finish, except for the glossy Lenovo logo, which adds a touch of elegance. Because of the matte finish, there are no issues with fingerprints making the laptop look dirty, although we would advise that you clean up the lid and the case every now and then with a soft microfibre cloth.

Plus, it also gets rid of those overtly aggressive-looking RGB lights. Instead, we only get to see a touch of illumination from the keyboard.

As for ports, on the right side, you’ll find 2 USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, a USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 port, and a 3.5 mm audio combo jack. Although it comes with a good range of modern and classic ports, though it’s missing an SD card slot, which could have been handy. You also get to see the power button here, along with a killswitch for the camera.

The laptop is designed for efficient cooling with large vents and has sturdy hinges. This allows the laptop’s lid to be opened very smoothly, with just one hand. As for any bezels, they are pretty slim, almost to the point where we would call them non-existent.

Overall, the Yoga Slim 7i offers a solid build and a premium design that punches above its price range, especially with the classy glass finish on the Lenovo logo. We also like the fact that, unlike most other thin-and-lights that we have tested so far, this felt the sturdiest and most well-built, all the while maintaining a truly slim profile.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 2024 Review: Display
Lenovo’s review unit showcases a stunning 14-inch OLED display, boasting a resolution of 1920X1200 and a glossy finish. The display is truly impressive, even for a Full HD Plus screen. With vibrant colours and incredibly deep blacks typical of OLED panels, it offers a visually striking experience.

Certified by Dolby Vision, DisplayHDR, the display ensures top-notch quality when it comes to pictures and images. The images are sharp, contrasty, vivid — almost full of life. Moreover, it has received an Eyesafe certification, indicating reduced blue light emission for better eye comfort. You also get TrueBlack 500, TUV Rheinland’s Flicker Reduced certification, and TUV Rheinland’s Low Blue Light certifications.

In terms of colour accuracy, the display performs really well as it covers 100% of the DCI-P3 colour space, making it perfect for enjoying multimedia content. While it slightly misses the promised 400 nits brightness, it still delivers an outstanding performance overall.

The only drawback is its 60Hz refresh rate, which might feel a bit lacking compared to the more common 90Hz displays in this price range.

The display’s quality is so impressive that it’s suitable for tasks that demand a high level of colour accuracy, like colour-grading photos or videos. We were more than happy to use the display for colour-correcting tons of photos and videos.

This 14-inch display offers an exceptional mix of vivid colour representation, decent brightness, and the trademark deep blacks that we see in all OLED screens. With support for Dolby Vision, it further elevates the visual experience. Watching a piece of proper HDR content on this laptop is truly a thing of joy.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 2024 Review: Keyboard and trackpad
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i has an excellent keyboard and touchpad. Starting with the keyboard, it boasts a well-organized standard layout that’s easy to use. The chiclet-styled keys are backlit and offer about 1.5mm of travel, striking a perfect balance between being too sticky or too soft.

This ensures a consistently comfortable typing experience for everyday tasks. In short, typing on this keyboard is tactile, feels great and is overall a pretty solid experience, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Lenovo truly has set a benchmark for Windows laptops when it comes to non-mechanical laptop keyboards.

Beneath the keyboard lies a decently sized touchpad, free from physical buttons, which strikes a good balance in terms of size. It avoids the discomfort of being overly large, providing users with a smooth navigation experience.

The touchpad feels excellent and is just big enough to offer seamless navigation. However, a slightly larger trackpad would have been appreciated.

When using the trackpad, each press on the surface delivers a satisfying click, and it effortlessly handles multitouch gestures. The touchpad’s accuracy and tracking capabilities are top-notch.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 2024 Review: Webcam and speakers
The Lenovo Yoga 7i features an FHD webcam positioned at the top, which is decent enough to get the job done. Although it is tuned well, it isn’t something to write home about. The camera allows users to shoot 1080p videos. While the footage from the built-in webcam isn’t exceptional, it gets the job done effectively.

What we like about the camera though, is the tonne of AI features that Intel’s Core Ultra 7 CPUs are bringing this year, but more on that later. Privacy-conscious users will also appreciate the fact that you get IR for Windows Hello and an e-shutter.

In terms of audio, the laptop boasts a stereo speaker setup that delivers a solid experience. With four 2W speakers and an amp located at the bottom, along with speaker vents on either side of the keyboard, the laptop offers a truly immersive experience. Tuned to Dolby Atmos’ specifications, the audio quality is surprisingly rich and maintains high-quality sound even at louder volumes.

The display and the speaker’s combination, and whatever magic Lenovo and Dolby have done for them, truly make for an awesome content consumption experience.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 2024 Review: Performance
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i packs some serious hardware. It comes with Intel’s new Core Ultra 7 155H processor along with 32GB LPDDR5x RAM 32GB running at 7467 MT/s. We get a maximum boost clock of up to 4.8Ghz, and 24MB of Intel Smart Cache. For storage, we get 1TB of M.2 M.2 PCIe 4.0-based NVMe SSD.

The Core Ultra 7 155H comes with 16 cores and 22 Threads. In Intel’s new lineup of CPUs, we get a new Low Power Efficient Core, so the Ultra 7 155H comes with 6 Performance Cores, 8 Efficient Cores and 2 new Low Power Efficient Cores. The new line of Intel’s processors also has an NPU in the chip package, dedicated to local AI tasks. Called Intel AI Boost, the NPU unit in the 155H runs at 1.4GHz.

The new Intel NPU has the potential to do all sorts of things, ranging from helping the laptop run better on its own by directing tasks to the proper resources. However, as of now, developers need to create apps and functions that will take advantage of Intel’s new NPUs, which will only be pushed through updates.

Having said that the new line of processors, especially the Core Ultra 7 155H does support a lot of cool features. We get camera tracking or autoframing features as well as eye-tracking in several supported web-calling apps. We also see marginally better background blurring in supported apps.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i is Intel Evo certified, which means it meets some of Intel’s most stringent guidelines. Not only do laptop manufacturers have to meet certain hardware and specification standards like featuring Thunderbolt 4, WiFi 6E, and a tonne of security and privacy features, but they also need to adhere to some quality-of-life features, like waking up from sleep in about a second.

Lenovo provides users with the Lenovo Vantage app, offering three distinct profiles for performance settings: Battery Saver, Intelligent Cooling, and High Performance. As always for our benchmarks, we set the laptop for the best performance, which in this case, meant setting it to High-Performance mode.

The Yoga Slim 7i performs remarkably well in various synthetic benchmarks and gets pretty impressive scores. It does fairly well in both light, single-threaded tasks as well as more demanding, multi-threaded tasks. It also does fairly well in some GPU applications, thanks to Intel’s on-board Arc graphics package, which is one of the biggest changes Intel has made to its processors this year.

The new Intel Core processors come with Intel’s Arc GPU, instead of Iris, so you do get a pretty decent graphics performance. We get 8 Xe cores, DX 12 ultimate support, hardware level Ray Tracing, and most importantly, hardware level H.264, HEVC and AV1 support.

Barring the impressive set of I/O, we also get WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 for wireless connectivity. Even though the Intel Core Ultra 7 supports WiFi 7, Lenovo decided against it for the Yoga Slim 7i. However, that won’t really be an issue, not at least for a couple of years.

Lenovo’s cooling design for the Yoga 7i effectively prevents thermal throttling even during peak thermal conditions. As a result the laptop rarely shows any heating issues or thermal throttling, even if you hit it hard with heavy, resource-hungry tasks.

And thanks to Intel’s Arc graphics, you also get to engage in some gaming as well, although not something too graphic intensive. It handles games like Rocket League and Counter-Strike pretty well.

This is really impressive when you consider the laptop’s slim and lightweight build. All in all it excels in general tasks, such as streaming media managing photos and some basic video editing assignments, as long as you keep your expectations in check.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 2024 Review: Battery
The Yoga Slim 7i comes with a 65Wh LiPo 4-cell battery. The battery life on the Yoga 9i is pretty respectable, especially when you consider that it is thin-and-light, that comes with an awesome OLED Display. OLED displays usually are the Achilles heel for laptop batteries, especially if they are hard-hitting performers.

On a typical work day which involved a lot of internet browsing, writing, and editing photos and some videos, I was getting about 8 hours of usage with the the Yoga Slim 7i. The display would be set at about 60-70 per cent brightness. If we really tried to push it, we reckon we could have managed about two hours of battery life, while on the Battery Saver mode. Having said that the new Intel Core Ultra processors are so efficient, you might not need to do that unless you’re in a pinch.

And even though the Yoga Slim 7i comes with a pretty solid battery life, it still supports Rapid Charge, which allows you to juice up your laptop for two additional hours, by charging it for 15-20 minutes, using the included 65W charger.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 2024 Review: Verdict
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i is a strong contender for those seeking a laptop with solid performance, excellent battery life, and a stunning display. The latest generation of Intel’s processors brings exciting advancements, particularly with the inclusion of AI features that promise even more functionality once developers tap into the new NPUs.

The Yoga Slim 7i still manages to handle graphics-intensive tasks and light gaming remarkably well despite lacking a dedicated GPU, unlike previous Intel laptops. Its sleek design and feature-rich build add to its appeal, although a faster display would have been a nice addition, the overall image quality is impressive.

All in all, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i is a solid choice for users in search of a thin-and-light laptop. With its exceptional screen, impressive performance, and long-lasting battery life, it offers a well-rounded solution for various computing needs. We won’t even think twice before recommending the Yoga Slim 7i as of writing this piece if you have a budget of just about Rs 1 lakh.