Lenovo IdeaPad S940 unboxing and first impressions By Neowin

Hey guys I'm rich from Neil win today we're unboxing the Lenovo IdeaPad s 940. So before we get into this at all, we got to talk a little about branding because Lenovo's branding is a little of a mess. So you remember just you know. Two years ago we had the yoga 920. That was the flagship convertible, and it was very simple at the time. Yoga man convertible IDF had mint clamshell simple right so, but they changed it to at some point that didn't apply at all anymore.

Yoga now means premium and IdeaPad is more mainstream budget. You know that lower end stuff, and so now we decide between convertibles and clamshells, based on a prefix before the number. So C means convertible s means slim, and it's a clamshell. So s 940. This is a clamshell and then like the C 930, that's a convertible and then Dean was gonna, be detachable, but I don't think they remembered use that just yet so, but you'll notice that this is called the IdeaPad s 940 and the reason for that is because well they're, just gonna call some of them idea pads in the United States.

That's it, so it is a premium device, even though it's still called idea pen, and it is a clamshell- although that's not what idea pad means in this situation, all right. So, let's, let's open up the box and see, what's in here, all right, big box in a little box inside alright, let's get rid of there's some shipping labels that just fell out all right, so this is a very little box, so there's going to be more stuff in here. Yes, this is something I see. Dell do I, don't think I've ever seen, Lenovo do it where they have the big box. They have the little box inside and then all that's in the little box is the laptop itself.

And then you have a separate box for chargers and such so, let's open this first, because we're going to spend a little time at the device. Once you open it, we have a 65 watt, charger, USB type-c as you'd expect and, of course, a power cable, no pet. Obviously, no pen support it's a clamshell, though it should have a touchscreen. This PC was first announced at CES, along with a million other devices, and that's just how we know ball rolls okay, so just when they have a product announcement, it's not just one product. They do like a half dozen at a time, so at CES they had the new pink pad x1 units as the carbon and the yoga note tablet this year they had the obviously this one, the s 940.

They had a new C 730, which was a 15.6 inch convertible, obviously, but the big selling point was that it comes with an AMOLED display, and then they had the 940 all-in-one, which is actually pretty awesome, and I'd really like to try that out at some point. But what's so weird is that I walked into this demo room where they have the C, seven thirty and the nine forty next to each other, and while this is a fourteen-inch screen and the C 730 is a 15.6-inch screen, the 730 just looks so much bigger, because this has such slim bezels. It doesn't look like a fourteen-inch device and by the way, the other devices they announced at CES were a couple gaming laptops, Allegiance, Y 740 and the 540 all right. So let's take a look because really like this box is so small. Like look at the size of this, you know it's like the size of my torso I.

Don't even know why I made that comparison. Those stupid, forget I, said it I'm not going to cut it out, though very, very slim, okay yeah. So we can see very small device. You see it has a little notch at the top and that just comes above the display. Okay, so remove this, you can actually see the display yeah, there's a little notch at the tops, like a reverse notch, so the webcam is up here and that's because it really just has such slim bezels.

So this, let's have a couple cool and interesting features aside from the reverse notch, which also doubles as a way to open it up, but it has what they call AI sensors, where it will alert you if someone's trying to look over your shoulder and see what you're working on or, if you have it hooked up to an external display. It will know when your eyes are looking at the other display and switch content to that display. There's another thing in here: just we have a separate compartment for paperwork. You know I have to, say I wouldn't mind if they use that compartment for the charger. So that's what's in the box, and now we're going to boot this up all right, so we're all booted up here, and I did not get a touchscreen model.

I. It should come with the touchscreen hook. That's just not what I got we can see is 4k. So it's going to be Dolby Vision, all right, 4k, unfortunately, I believe that's an it isn't core i7, but 8 gigs of RAM, and it does come with 256 gigs of storage. I am already going to recommend going for 16 gigs of ram I.

Think that's the way to go if you're, especially if you're buying a premium device okay. So we get to see, though, how small the bezels are all around- and you just have this notch up here. So there's some extra sensors up here there's a tiny little webcam, okay, clickable trackpad, Dolby Atmos speakers on the side, so you're going to have a premium audio experience from this device as well. You see it's super slim, so what we have over here is USB type-c and a 3.5 millimeter, combo audio jack and then over here, two more type-c ports. These are both Thunderbolt, three okay.

So no type-a I believe this is the first device from the 900 series so that completely lean out USB type a. But this device is stunning. It's just a beautiful. It is a beautiful laptop and that's why I really had my eye on this. When I saw it and see it just seems like a winner, it has, you can see there, there's curved glass on the side of the display, it's very just pretty, to look at, and I really think.

Lenovo has a winner with the design. Here. The screen is beautiful, shallower keyboard than you get with a thick pad. You know, standard consumer models. Stuff I do believe is an option for a fingerprint sensor.

Oh, that's not on this device. This device does have an IR camera. That's up here in that little reverse notch. Okay, so here's the Lenovo advantage that just popped up welcome your device. Let's get you set up or Lenovo welcome.

There was just a little advantage notification which apparently supports voice control now, and this does have far-field voice mic, so you can use it for a lean or Cortana or whatever you like to use for your digital assistant. I think those are really the only two on Windows we've also got this feature called glance, and what that's supposed to do? It's, it's kind of eye tracking or head tracking, whatever it is, I'm, not sure how it works. I've never seen a feature like this before, so a couple will be great if you disable plans by clicking on the visualizer snap windows from screen to screen. So the idea is that, like I said before, if you have another monitor hooked up, you just look at the other screen, and it just moves the content. I'm, not sure how I feel about that yeah.

So snap, the pointer from screen to screen your pointer will teleport to the list. When you were looking I mean I, don't know we'll see we'll see about this I'm, not it's about the snooze, because you don't close your monitor. I never had a monitor plugged in I'm, just not sure how I feel about moving content from one window to another, just by moving my eyes, I'm, pretty comfortable dragging dragging and dropping using a mouse, so we'll kind of see how that goes. So that's mostly it for the device itself he's very slim, very light portable and such a small footprint and I just I love the display and I love the glass on the edges. Wow, that's unnecessary.

It looks like I'm gonna. Well, obviously, it has McAfee on it, and obviously that is the first thing that we're going to be removing after I do a factory reset, because this did come with a Lenovo account pre-installed, as many review units do so. Okay, I'll always do a factory reset put my own account on there, and it's uninstalled McAfee, because it's the worst software that you can get it's their responsible for OEM pre-installed on devices and I highly recommend everyone uninstall McAfee, alright. So back to what I was saying before that popped up, we have a 9 series thing up here: it's just pretty cool they're, clearly going for a little of branding around their premium lineup, which is the 9 series. You know that that's something we're seeing more and more common, and so you know like sort of how HP does on the specter, if they have it right out on will along the hinge will say Specter, but obviously Lenovo is going for the front of the device.

Um standard, gray, color and I. Don't love the design from the outside I think it looks rather bland in this color I. Think that the inside, that's really where we're the winner is, and it's such a pretty device to look at I, wonder like if I, if I, if I, can use this thing in Starbucks, so I might look over just because it's pretty you know, I'll get an alert that someone's trying to spy on me. You know, but yeah, it's going to be a great device and I know that already so the last yoga 9 series device that I reviewed was the C 930 before the head. It was the yoga 920, but with the C 930, what they did was they had a hinge with a sound bar right across here, and so that worked where you know if you use it like a clamshell, it sounds firing right out of you and then, if you fold them, the display back, the sound bar would rotate.

So, no matter how you're, using it you'd have that sound bar 20, and you had great audio quality. So with this we can see. We, like I, said the Dolby Atmos peak they're, just firing up at you, because it's a clamshell and the reason I'm telling that story about the previous device, which is a different form factor, is because I'm sure that the audio quality on this would be great, because we've already seen one HVO have that focus on powerful and immersive audio quality and Dolby Atmos is always perfect, I'm, so happy. We have this trend of seeing it on laptops and even smartphones. Now there are also according to a guide.

There are two downward firing. Speakers, oh yeah, so if we have them on the side say there are also downward firing. Speakers, so I have not seen that on a laptop that I've noticed I've seen it on convertibles from HP, where that was their idea for how you can use your as you use it as a tablet where the display is folded, all the way back and still have audio firing at you. So this is meant to work with Dolby Atmos in a way that I, don't completely understand it, says alright, I'm gonna, it's been to augment spatial sound that gives movies and music much more depth paired with Dolby's, user-friendly software and that's that, so I'm going to test this out. Okay, I'll, probably compared to some other Dolby Atmos devices that don't have speakers on the bottom and speaking of Dolby.

We also have eight Dolby Vision display, as I pointed out so like I said they announced the c7 30 at the same time and that that was AMOLED, so we're seeing a big trend towards OLED in some parts of the market, and we're also seeing a big trend towards more standard HDR displays like this one. So this is so. This is Dolby Vision. This is something that Lenovo started doing last year with its ThinkPad x1, because two years ago they were all OLED. Then they switched to double vision.

And now it kind of seems that they're moving back to OLED. But this one is television, so you get Dolby Atmos combined with Dolby Vision, and you should be able to get a really immersive media consumption experience out of this laptop, like I, said I'm pretty excited to try it out. So this particular model it is available. Now it cost 17, $99.99 and, like I, said core i7 285 65 you, you can get it with a core i5. If you want I, don't really recommend Core i5 I, you know, I, think you want that performance boosts 14 inches, HD display eight gigs of ram 256 gigs of storage.

If you want more ram, it does come in 16, gigs I always recommend 16 gigs it. It's your more future-proofed. You know whatever you want to do with this thing. It's good! It's a powerful machine. You're going to want to be able to do more.

At some point, I probably want 512 gigs of storage. This one's got 256 but um. You know I'm always looking for the perfect laptop, and it doesn't exist. Obviously, but what I'm looking for always is something that's really portable, and I could get all my work done with and also enjoy media content with. So usually what I end up with is something a lot like: a Dell XPS 15, where it's got that 8 Series processor.

It's got dedicated graphics, but then that has terrible battery life. So this one has the media consumption experience, and it has great productivity experience. So most of the work that I'm going to do this is going to be great at it almost especially would be if it had 16 gigs of RAM, but yes, so $17.99 for this model more. If you want more- and it's got a lot, it's a just look at how tiny the bezels are, how beautiful just the display the load is very glossy. The curved edges, the flat top the even the 9 Series imprint, the Dolby Atmos speakers.

I, think this is a well-designed clamshell laptop I really wish these. Oh, your computer comes with Plant by Mira metrics. You want to try it now. Well, the notification went away. Maybe I'll check it out later.

One last thing about this display, though two point: four millimeter bezels on the sides: three point: six millimeters on the top 4.4 mm, the bottom 90% screen to body ratio and the only company that that claims a higher screen to body ratio than that is wobbly with the meat book ex-pro claiming 91%. So yeah, awesome thing: I'm going to have a review on this in about a month, so stay tuned for that I'm rich from Neil win have a great night.

Source : Neowin