Joining an army of OLED laptops that have launched this month is Lenovo’s new IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon (branded as the Yoga Slim 7 Carbon outside of North America). Lenovo claims it’s the lightest 14-inch OLED laptop on the market at 2.37 pounds. (I’m guessing the company is right. The closest competitor I can think of is Asus’ ZenBook 14X OLED, which is 3.09 pounds. It’s also lighter than both the ZenBook 13 OLED and the Dell XPS 13 OLED.)
One thing to note is that the OLED panel (from Samsung Display) comes with QHD+ resolution, rather than the 4K resolution that you often see on OLED laptops. This means you won’t get as many pixels as you would on a 4K OLED machine (like the ZenBook 14X), but you may also see better battery life. QHD+ is still plenty sharp, especially at this size.
There are other things to like about the display, too. It has a 16:10 aspect ratio, which will afford more vertical space than the 16:9 panel on last year’s IdeaPad Slim 7. Lenovo says it has a 90Hz refresh rate (a hallmark that Samsung promised would appear on more OLED laptops this year), will cover 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and will reach 600 nits of brightness.
Inside, the Slim 7 can be configured with up to an AMD Ryzen 7 5800U, an Nvidia GeForce MX450 graphics card, 16GB of memory, and 1TB of storage. There’s a 61Whr battery that Lenovo claims will last up to 14.5 hours — which may seem like a tall order, but we got close to that out of last year’s Slim 7, which had a slightly smaller battery.
Lenovo also insists the thing is durable, despite its light build. Per the company, the device has undergone “nine operational tests” for durability, and can withstand “everyday physical shock and harsh environmental conditions.” It’s expected to hit shelves in October with a starting price of $1,289.99.
Lenovo also showed off a new Yoga Slim 7 Pro (branded as the IdeaPad Slim 7 Pro outside North America — I know, it’s confusing). This is a 16-inch laptop with a regular IPS touchscreen rather than an OLED, though it’s also 16:10 and has QHD resolution. That screen goes up to 120Hz, an even bigger boon for the gaming crowd. Models come with up to a Ryzen 7 5800H, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. There’s a 75Whr battery. The Slim 7 Pro is expected in October with a starting price of $1,449.
