Lenovo stuffs Alexa into its Yoga 730 and 530 convertible laptops
UTILITARIAN LAPTOP MAKER Lenovo has taken its Yoga 2-in-1 convertible laptops and whacked Amazon’s Alexa into them.
The Lenovo Yoga 730 is an evolution of the Windows 10-rocking Yoga 720, so don’t go expecting any revolutions in design; rather, the new Yoga is slimmer and lighter than its predecessor.
Design tweaks have given the hinges a little slope but haven’t got rid of a chunky bezel at the bottom of the display, and there’s no Windows Hello-supporting webcam. You you do get a fingerprint scanner though, biometrics fans.
Coming in15in and 13in versions, the Yoga 730 makes use of Intel’s 8th-gen Core i processors, sport up to 16GB of RAM and up to 512GB or 1TB of storage for the 13in and 15in models respectively.
Ports come in the form of two Thunderbolt 3 and one USB 3.0 for the 13in model, while its bigger brother has an extra USB Type-A port and an HDMI connection.
Displays can be specced in either Full HD or 4K and both come with support for the Active Pen 2 stylus.
Hardly ground-breaking stuff, but things get a little more interesting with the 15in model, which can have a Nvidia GTX 1050 graphics card popped into it to give it some graphics crunching power for video editing and gamer types.
The most interesting aspect of the new Yogas is the addition of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant which will allow users to bark questions and orders at the Yogas in much the same way they would do to an Amazon Echo smart speaker .
The convertible laptops will listen in for trigger phrases providing they are open and a user is logged in. Alexa will also have to play nice with Microsoft’s Cortana which comes baked into Windows 10.
The same Alexa smarts can be found on the Yoga 530, for some reason known as the Flex 14 in the US, which offers a more budget-orientated take on the Yoga range.
The 14in machine comes with all the usual specs of the latest Intel processors, up to a Core i7, and up to 16GB of RAM, blah, blah blah. You can add in a Nvidia MX130 mobile GPU though for some extra pixel pushing power, though don’t go expecting some heavy gaming or video rendering.
There’s not much in the way of svelte design here with the Yoga 530 looking very much the budget device when compared with the more streamlined Yoga 730.
While there’s no word on UK pricing, the 13in Yoga 720 start at $879, the 15in model will begin at $899, and the Yoga 530 starts at a cheap and cheerful $549. µ
