At CES 2020, the Lenovo showed off a first look at the finished project the Yoga 5G.
The Yoga 5G looks fairly bland, barely distinguishable from any of Lenovo’s other midrange laptops. But the internal specs are where things get interesting: instead of an Intel processor, it’s got Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx (making it the second laptop announced to use the chip) as well as Qualcomm’s X55 5G modem. It’ll support millimeter-wave and sub-6GHz 5G networks as well as LTE.
he Yoga 5G has some interesting features. Specifically, it packs nine antennas for stronger 5G signals, and will support both sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave technologies that are crucial to the network. There’s also eSIM capability built in. To be clear, though, few carriers have deployed mmwave service, nor have they supported eSIM at a widespread level, so this is more of a future-proofing technique.
Having built-in connectivity tends to drain a notebook’s battery, but Lenovo says the Yoga 5G will still last up to 24 hours on a charge. There’s also a “software-enabled intelligent temperature control” system that adjusts performance depending on what you’re doing to keep the laptop cool, though we haven’t seen that in action yet.
The rest of the specs here are pretty straightforward. The Yoga 5G has a vivid 14-inch full HD screen that hits up to 400 nits of brightness, which was sufficient for the demo room we were in. Since it is a Yoga-branded laptop, it’s also got a 360-degree hinge so you can use it as a 2-in-1. An onboard fingerprint scanner enables more convenient logins, as well as an IR camera above the display.
Lenovo says that it’s the first 5G computer powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon laptop processors. Admittedly, that’s not a difficult claim, given that there still aren’t a lot of laptops that use Qualcomm’s processors. But it means that the Yoga 5G will be an interesting test case for whether Qualcomm’s chips working in concert can deliver a comparable experience with cellular internet and battery life as they do on smartphones and tablets.
The Yoga 5G will be available this spring, starting at $1,499, but you may also want to consider the price of a data line when calculating how much to spend.
