Lenovo’s ThinkPad L390 Yoga is a vital work computer in many ways. It’s chunkier than many different skinny-and-light laptops in its fee variety. However, it also packs many business enterprise-friendly capabilities, consisting of temperature and surprise resistance and a ramification of connection ports.
At the same time, the L390 Yoga has a few excellent touches to help it stand out from the corporation P.C. Most significantly; it has a keyboard that feels exquisite to sit on and one of the nicest clicking mechanisms you’ll discover on any trackpad. If you’re not planning to do plenty of work outside—and might consequently tolerate the L390 Yoga’s confined screen brightness—this might be your next workhorse.
Tech specs
We reviewed a $1,079 model of Lenovo’s ThinkPad L390 Yoga, which has a 13.3-inch 1080p touchscreen, a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-8265U processor, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, a 256GB SSD, and Windows 10 Pro. True to Lenovo’s Yoga branding, the L390 has a 360-degree hinge, so you can turn the screen around and use it as a pill.
However, the genuine configuration can vary depending on the store. Staples and CDW, for instance, promote a $1 hundred twenty version of the L390 Yoga with an infrared camera for face reputation; however, Lenovo’s internet site no longer exists. You can also configure a model on Lenovo’s website for as little as $899, with 128GB of a garage, no keyboard backlighting, no fingerprint reader, and Windows 10 Home instead of Windows 10 Pro. Conversely, you may build a totally-loaded laptop with a Core i7-8565U processor, 32GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD for $1,893.
Design and display
The ThinkPad L390 Yoga isn’t precisely skinny and mild. Weighing in at three forty-four kilos and measuring 0.74 inches thick, it feels more like a modernization of yesteryear’s hefty ThinkPads than a peer-svelte laptop like Dell’s XPS thirteen and Lenovo’s personal IdeaPad 730S.
That feeling is strengthened through the ThinkPad’s display bezels, which are degree zero. Six inches alongside the perimeters, with a zero.7-inch upper bezel and a 1.5-inch “chin” beneath the display screen. Thick borders like those are commonplace amongst convertible laptops, but we’ve seen a few exceptions, including HP’s Spectre x360 thirteen. Then, once more, those slicker laptops haven’t been subjected to the various shock, vibration, dirt, and high-temperature exams that the L390 Yoga has long passed through.
The show is an IPS panel with first-rate viewing angles, but it’s also one of the dimmest screens you’ll locate on a laptop in this rate variety, maxing out at 258 nits’ brightness. By evaluation, the HP Spectre x360 13 reaches 350 nits, Microsoft’s Surface Pro 6 reaches 378 nits, and Lenovo’s IdeaPad 730S hits 317. In practical terms, the L390 Yoga calls for nearly complete brightness to be applied quite simply in properly lit rooms, and outdoor computing classes can beirritateTouchpad and keyboard.
While the display is a letdown, Lenovo does place the ThinkPad L390 Yoga’s bulk to suitable use, with a keyboard that affords masses of the tour and feels snappy instead of comfortable. You can find for hours on the ThinkPad’s defend-fashioned keys without soreness. In a typing take, I average 102 words in keeping with a minute at the ThinkPad L390 Yoga instead of one hundred and five phrases consistent with a minute on my regular mechanical keyboard. I never felt uncomfortable going through the barrage of tests. (Apple could analyze a factor or Lenovo at this factor.)
Lenovo additionally managed to generate more keys than normal for a PC on this site, including an additional-extensive escape key and committed keys for Home/End/Insert/Delete. The arrow keys are roughly the same length, with Page Up/Down keys located with no trouble above the left and right arrows. There’s even a piece of spacing between each cluster of four Function keys. Flipping the Fn and Ctrl keys around calls for a ride to BIOS settings and leaves you with mislabeled keys. The most effective nitpick is Lenovo’s insistence on placing the feature key in the bottom-left corner of its ThinkPads. In contrast, most Windows laptops use a control key as a substitute.
The ThinkPad L390 Yoga’s highly-priced feel extends to the touchpad. I opt for tapping with most laptops because the clicking mechanism is too loud and inflexible. Clicking the L390’s trackpad nearly feels like pressing a key on the keyboard, and I found myself using tap-to-click less regularly. While the touchpad might be large, it uses a clean mylar coating to float around on.
Of course, the Yoga L390 also retains the ThinkPad line’s iconic TrackPoint nub on the middle of the keyboard, in conjunction with devoted left—and proper-click-on buttons above the touchpad. I’ll get used to the former in no way, which now feels more like a classy flourish than a user input mechanism, but retaining one hand at the touchpad while using the other hand for button clicks can be efficient when you’re no longer typing.
Ports and stylus
Beyond the keyboard and trackpad, the ThinkPad L390 Yoga justifies its hefty layout with the aid of lots of ports. This is the first time Lenovo has abandoned its proprietary ThinkPad charger as a substitute for 3 USB-C ports ( on the left facet, one at the proper). I became grateful for the exchange, specifically after a current journey in which I used an unmarried charger for the laptop, an Android phone, and a Nintendo Switch. All three are USB three.1 Gen 1 port, which means the guide switch hastens to 5Gbps. Lenovo also boasts “anti-fry” safety on its USB-C ports, which may protect against harm using poorly designed 0.33-celebration charging cables.
The ThinkPad doesn’t mandate USB-C for every connection, even though. The pc’s left aspect also has USB-A and HDMI ports, at the same time as the proper side packs a 2nd USB-A port, along with a headphone/microphone jack, a MicroSD card slot, an ethernet extension connector, and a hole for protection locks. It might’ve been satisfactory to have the right ethernet port, a full-sized SD slot, and Thunderbolt assists; however, the port arrangement nevertheless feels beneficial at a time when USB-C is beginning to update the whole thing.
It’s clean to overlook. However, the ThinkPad even includes a small active stylus with 2,048 tiers of strain sensitivity tucked into the computer’s bottom-proper edge. It’s no substitute for a Microsoft Surface if you want to do severe drawing or picture layout paintings (Microsoft’s Surface Pen has two times the strain sensitivity and is much larger). However, it’s true enough for handwritten notes in OneNote or records markup in Drawboard PDF.
Audio, webcam, and safety
Surprisingly enough, for a commercial enterprise laptop, a fingerprint reader is non-compulsory at the ThinkPad L390 Yoga, although it’s protected with ,the most inexpensive configuration. Unlike earlier ThinkPads, it also shops fingerprint data inside a chip on the sensor module itself, which is extra cozy than sending facts to the system’s host processor for authentication. The webcam is less latest, though, presenting just a 720p decision for images and motion pictures. The loss of face recognition on most models is a downer.
As for audio, the ThinkPad L390 Yoga faucets Dolby Audio for speaker tuning and equalization. The result is respectable sound quality for films or tunes, especially at slight volumes, even though it’s usually a bit on the thin facet.
Performance
Because the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga is a work device, PCMark’s Work 2.0 check is arguably the most important benchmark, simulating a battery of productivity tasks, including word processing and video chat. A score of 2,000 or better shows first-rate overall performance. Fortunately, the ThinkPad L390 Yoga reached the top of the percent, no question assisted by Intel’s new “Whiskey Lake” Core i5-8265U processor. Performance becomes almost similar to Lenovo’s IdeaPad 730S, which features an equal CPU and becomes predictably behind HP’s Core i7-based Spectre x360 13.
The L390 Yoga falls roughly in line with other laptops in its charge variety in different checks. Cinebench, for instance, measures a brief burst of CPU activity as it renders three-D photos, and the ThinkPad L390 Yoga got here out slightly behind different Core-i5 laptops.
The L390 Yoga’s rating in HandBrake, which encodes an MKV video file to the MP4 format, also became nothing unique. This is a quad-core PC, so we’re no longer amazed that it treated the encoding in closer to one hour than hours.
The ThinkPad L390 Yoga’s larger design may help from a thermal angle. However, its single grille beneath the laptop’s rear-proper facet does nothing to keep it cool over long periods.
One place in which the L390 Yoga, without a doubt, lagged behind comparable laptops turned into 3DMark’s Sky Diver benchmark, which tests GPU overall performance. (In reality, doing so with the Yoga folded into tent mode on an espresso table or kitchen counter is pretty satisfactory.) given that different laptops in this magnificence can’t cope with modern-day 3-D games. Besides, this isn’t a first-rate loss, and the L390 Yoga can play some 2D indie games like the new Toejam & Earl without issue.
The handiest real letdown here changed into battery life, with the ThinkPad L390 Yoga averaging 7 hours and 34 minutes in our video rundown check. This is one of the worst scores we’ve seen among cutting-edge thin-and-mild laptops.
However, it’s now not out of line with a few other ThinkPads, like the L480 (8 hours and thirteen minutes) and the X1 Tablet (7 hours and six minutes). At least the new USB-C charger can bring the L390 Yoga back to 80 percent of its full price in an hour.
Should you buy the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga?
While the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga isn’t the most appealing computer you can get, it compensates for its lack of favor with a killer keyboard, a fulfilling trackpad, and many ways to connect to external devices. You might not enjoy lugging it around or using its dim display outdoors; however, it can make work a bit more bearable when you’re stuck at your desk.