Lenovo has been on fire with their Yoga range in the last few months for home and business laptops (with my top picks being the Yoga 900 and the Thinkpad Yoga X1). Yoga being ‘on fire’ That makes me think of this:

Not to digress any further, the latest product I’ve been sent in the Yoga range (Thanks Lenovo!), is the Yoga Home 500.

When I first heard about it, all I knew was that it was an all-in-one PC. That didn’t sound too exciting – A screen and desktop box in a single unit, a form factor that had been around for many years, but I’d never actually had one to check out. What arrived was much more than what my expectations were.

Firstly yes, the Yoga Home 500 is an all-in-one PC. But it’s also a tablet. And a gaming box. And a family device hub for photos and videos.

I’ll start with the PC side of things. We have a 21.5″ screen, with a computer build into the chassis. Here’s the specs, I’ve underlined the ones I have in this model which seem to be the best possible :)

Lenovo Yoga Home 500Tech Specs

Some notes on the specs and hardware – There are two RAM slots, but with 8GB it was a single stick, meaning this can easily be upgraded to 16GB, assuming the RAM isn’t soldered in – I can’t find any videos or photos of the insides of this, and there’s no screws to be seen so most likely comes apart like an Apple iMac using a plunger.

The hard drive appears to be a hybrid with 8GB SSD cache, and close to 1TB for the rest. This gives a bit of a better performance than your standard platter HDD, but not as good as an SSD. I found it fairly snappy overall despite this.

The screen seems of high quality, touch response was great. The dedicated NVIDIA Geforce 920A graphics card is a nice touch too, especially for being able to at least game with lower settings.

Yoga Home 500 Front

So yes, it seems to function quite fine as an all-in-one PC, and does everything you’d expect from a Windows 10 box. On the right hand side of the chassis is the power and volume up/down buttons:

Right Hand Side

… and on the left hand side is a Multi-Card Reader, Audio 3.5mm Jack, Three USB 3.0 ports, a HDMI in (so you can just use this as a monitor) and power in, using the standard rectangle plug that most (but not all) Lenovo products have these days:

Left Hand Side

As you can see from those photos, there’s a cool kickstand that holds the monitor up. This is fully adjustable (as in, you can set it to any position in it’s range, rather than just having a few locked options) and goes all the way down to tablet mode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTR28suT5FY&feature=youtu.be

Tablet mode – this is where things start to get interesting. It’s a giant tablet, that has a 3 hour battery. Lenovo provides software called Aura along with a bunch of apps and games, and an app store for free. From what I can tell, the idea of this is to have a device in the middle of the table that a family or group of friends can sit around and have fun with. 4 player touch games, along with using the paddles and joysticks that come free with the Yoga Home 500, or going through photos and videos is where this device shows it’s strengths. I can see this being really useful for coming back from a holiday and showing photos off, flicking through and telling a story about what happened.

I thought I’d do a quick video on this, where it shows objects in Aura can be flicked across the screen, and orientated whichever way you like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcfvST4jPRg&feature=youtu.be

The games that come with this are actually quite decent, rather than being crappy low end games. Here you can see an asteroid type game that can take up to 4 players, using touch, joysticks or even bring your own controllers:

The app store seems to have a variety of different games, and yes there’s Air Hockey!

Other items that come with the Yoga Home 500 are a keyboard and mouse (both paired already to the device, no little bluetooth dongle required):

Stylish mouse with touch sensitive scrollwheel

Thin keyboard

There’s also the paddles and joysticks for playing games:

Joystick has plunger, paddles have 4 touchpads

And of course, because you’ll be putting your grubby mitts all over this thing, there’s a screen cleaner:

Official Lenovo Screen Cleaner

All together this is a pretty cool piece of kit. The 3 hours battery life means you can take this wherever you like in the house and play on it, but you’ve also got a giant screen and a lot of power under the hood for a particularly large portable device.

The Lenovo Yoga Home 500 is an all-rounder device, but does all those things quite well, rather than falling into the trap of doing all things averagely. It’s easy to use, has a multitude of use cases and due to it’s small footprint, it isn’t hard to find it a home somewhere around the house.

Any comments or questions about this, please respond below!