Lenovo Yoga C930 Preview – Rotatable Dolby sound and image
Lenovo is the manufacturer of Yoga convertibles, or laptops where the screen can fold around the housing, so that you can also use them as a tablet or something in between tablet and laptop. The most expensive consumer model to date was the Yoga 920 , with a 13.9″ 4k screen. At IFA, that model was replaced by the Yoga C930, also with a 4k screen, but now with Dolby Vision HDR and a rotatable ‘Sound Bar’ below the screen, with Dolby Atmos certification.
The Yoga hinge has been copied countless times, so Lenovo had to do something new to differentiate itself with the Yoga C930. The manufacturer does this to start with the sleek design. According to Lenovo, a convertible should work well in laptop and tablet mode, and that starts with a beating appearance. According to the manufacturer, previous Yoga laptops looked strange in tablet mode and that has been addressed with the C930, so that the housing parts in laptop and tablet mode connect equally nicely.
You don’t have to know that thought behind the design to see that the Yoga C930 has a beautifully designed housing. The metal housing looks sleek, with a shiny edge on the right side, on which no connection can be found. You can also see clean lines without distractions on the keyboard and below. The touchpad is fairly large and the keyboard sits above it, slightly recessed into the metal case. At first glance, the attack is ‘simply good’. Not bad considering the thickness of the laptop, but it is also not a keyboard for typing long stretches. By the way, there are very few ultrabooks on which we would like to do that. Right below the keyboard is a square area and that is the fingerprint scanner. As mentioned, other things don’t disturb the sleek design until you look further up.
Rotatable Dolby
That’s where the rotatable sound bar is located, with a Dolby Atmos logo. Those rotatable speakers also have to do with the idea that the C930 should work just as well as a laptop as in tablet mode. The idea is that the soundbar is always more or less on the same side as the screen, the side where the user is. That way you always have sound that comes straight from the front and is not directed in the wrong direction.
That sounds good in theory, but the fact that they are rotatable does not make the speakers qualitatively better. The soundbar is assisted by two speakers that are incorporated in a more conventional place, in the bottom of the laptop, but they also do not deliver convincing sound. That is to say: for a laptop we thought the speakers on the noisy exhibition floor sounded quite nice, but no Dolby sticker can change anything about the shrill sound that small speakers bring. The biggest advantage of the rotating soundbar is therefore not the sound quality, but the fact that it is always more or less aimed at the user, which means that the sound is in any case more understandable than with a laptop whose speakers do not rotate.
More Dolby
The soundbar is not the only thing on which we find the Dolby logo; the screen is certified for Dolby Vision. The HDR mode goes up to a maximum brightness of 500cd/m² and Lenovo showed the HDR images at the stand with a video that had to demonstrate the differences between switched on and off HDR. In the video, the non-HDR images looked very gray, so we can only really say something about the quality of the screen when we review the laptop and put our own comparison material on the screen.
Dolby Vision is only supported if you purchase the 4k version of the C930, but there is also a full HD version. The latter is interesting for users who find a long battery life important, because according to Lenovo it is 14.5 hours for the 1920×1080 version.
Stylus and other hardware
The last thing the C930 wants to distinguish itself with is the included stylus. Lenovo is not the first to include a pen, but the manufacturer has found an elegant solution for this. The pin is in fact slid into the housing next to the hinge.
The choice for that place also fits in with the idea that the C930 should be a good laptop and tablet at the same time. If you flip the screen to tablet mode and thus rotate the screen around the housing, you can reach the pen and draw on the screen. The active pen is automatically charged at that location, but could not become too large given the thickness of the laptop. If you seriously want to get started with writing utensils, it is more convenient to buy a larger size stylus, but if you need a simple stylus, this solution is a solution. It is also nice that Lenovo includes the pen for free, because that was not the case with previous models.
A small disadvantage of the stylus is that it is only accessible when you fold the screen around the housing, so in tent or tablet mode. If you want to use the pen in laptop mode, completely against Lenovo’s design philosophy, you first have to fold the screen to fish the stylus out of the housing.
Preliminary conclusion
We don’t know yet if that’s a big problem, because we haven’t tested any laptops with Whiskey Lake yet, so we don’t know how big the difference is with Kaby Lake Refresh. However, that is not the only thing we would like to test on the C930, because we also want to see the HDR screen in a darkened room and of course we are curious whether the C930 actually achieves a battery life of 14.5 hours. . We are already convinced that the Dolby logo on the speaker is nothing more than that, a logo, and that the quality has little to do with what you can experience in the cinema or with a good surround system. On the other hand, perhaps the main advantage of the soundbar is the fact that the speaker is turned towards the user in most modes, which is not the case with other convertibles.
In short, Lenovo has succeeded in giving the Yoga concept an original twist with the C930. All that beauty comes with a price, because the cheapest version will cost 1500 euros and will be in stores this month.