First Impression: Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro is super sexy

Today at an event in New Delhi, Lenovo the Chinese technology giant showcased its latest Ultrabook, which is Yoga 3 Pro. The product is being billed as the thinnest UltraBook and in typical Lenovo style it can be used in a myriad of modes. We managed to play around with the product for a bit, so read on for our first impressions.

The first thing that strikes you is that the Yoga 3 Pro is incredibly thin. Lenovo says that it is 1.27cm thin, which makes it thinner than the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro retina display, and we are inclined to agree. It is almost wafer-like. That said, it feels very premium as it is built using a metal alloy, and feels quite sturdy.

Lenovo's Yoga notebooks are known for their tent-mode and their ability to lay completely flat. The Yoga 3 Pro continues this tradition. We flexed the notebook in various modes - and its hinge felt quite robust and gave us confidence that the keyboard and the screen will not snap apart.

Internally, it is also one of the first notebooks to be powered by the new Intel Core-M processor, which is clocked at up to 2.9GHz. This CPU has been designed for machines that don't have fans and for the part we found the Yoga 3 Pro to be very silent and cool. That being true, we did not stress test the machine so it is a little hard to make a judgement.

Paired with 8GB RAM and a fast 512GB solid state disk, the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro feels quite fast. However, we think its performance could be inferior to say a MacBook Pro with Retina Display simply because it runs a fan-less Core-M CPU instead of a Core-i7 or Core-i5 processor, which power most UltraBooks.

It has a 13.3-inch display, which has a QHD resolution and supported multi-touch technology. We found it to be quite vibrant, but again in the dim-lit press conference we could not properly check out the quality of the screen.

The one thing that really impressed us was the new keyboard. It offered good travel and tactile feedback and we could start typing at a pretty rapid clip. The trackpad also felt smooth, though still, it is not in the same league as Mac's glass trackpad.

Lenovo claims up to 8 hours of battery life, which is decent for a machine of its class, but often Windows PCs flatter to deceive. This is something we will need to test out in the review.

The device comes with twin USB 3.0 ports and USB 2.0 port, which doubles as DC-In. Lenovo has tied up with Microsoft to provide a year's subscription of the Office 365 cloud service to sweeten the deal, but that's something a Rs 20,000 laptop provides.

The big problem is the Rs 1,14,990 price. It frankly makes for an extremely expensive purchase which is arguably more expensive than even some of the MacBook Pros with the retina display. While, one does get things like the adaptability of a Yoga notebook, Lenovo's great keyboard and a touchscreen, it is not clear if these additions make it a superior product. We will be testing the notebook in the near future, so stay tuned for our review to know the answer.