LAS VEGAS -- Lenovo's Flex line of laptops has always been a bit of a head scratcher. Like the Yoga line that clearly inspired it, the first two generations of Flex featured a dual-hinge design that folded back past 180 degrees. But unlike the Yoga, which could fold all the way over and form a tablet shape, the Flex rather conspicuously stopped at 300 degrees. It was a laptop that could bend backwards into a kiosk mode, but no further.
Frankly, the only real justification for that design seemed to be funnelling buyers into the more expensive Yoga products. That said, the Flex actually made for an excellent budget laptop with decent components, if you ignored its half-hybrid hinge.
So, what makes this different from the Yoga? In reality, not much. But it seems that the Yoga designation is being reserved for more expensive systems with better components, and the Flex is transitioning into being the Yoga-lite, as even the least expensive 11-inch Yoga 3 starts at $799 in the US.
The 11-inch Flex 3 tops out at a Pentium CPU from Intel and a lower-res 1,366x768 display, while the 14- and 15-inch models will use Intel's new fifth-generation Core i-series CPUs, and have optional 1,920x1,080 displays.
