LENOVO YOGA BOOK C930

One of the best-designed laptops we’ve ever seen also proves to be one of the most frustrating

This laptop is so beautiful, everyone in our office wanted to try it. But, as we discover, looks can be deceiving

We get a lot of laptops in the T3 office, but it’s been years since anything turned heads like this Yoga Book has. The C930 is absolutely gorgeous in its fine metal grey, all sleek flat lines and impossibly thin at 9.9mm closed. Then you knock its lid twice and it pops open automatically, causing another gasp. And then people see the E-Ink screen, which sits where the keys would be, acting as keyboard, note-taking tool and ereader, depending on what you need. “Wow,” they say, “so is it any good?” And you just… sigh.

Key change

Here’s how that E-Ink screen works for replacing the keyboard: when you open up the laptop, you unlock it with your fingerprint, and the lower screen pops into life, usually showing whatever you were doing on it last, though sometimes we found that it was very stubborn about clearing the placeholder screen that appears when it’s turned off.

But mostly, if you were in notetaking mode last time, for example, it will immediately show that, often in the wrong orientation, in the case of the note tool. You tap a button in the corner to switch between keyboard mode and the other options.

The good news is that the keyboard is surprisingly decent. Not as good as a physical keyboard, but we actually became kind of fond of it. When you press a key, there’s some haptic feedback that feels soft and clacky, like a typewriter key more than your average laptop key. Our typing was definitely less accurate on it, though, and we found using Shift in particular unreliable – it’s too easy to slide your finger off while reaching.

Some good ideas have gone into the keyboard, such as the option for two different balances between key size and trackpad, though actually we’d have liked something between the two. As a trackpad, the screen works fairly well – it’s responsive, though to rightclick reliably you need to press a fake button on it, which is awkward.

We could forgive these issues if the E-Ink screen excelled in its other functions, but it very much doesn’t.

Drawing with the pen (included in the £1,299 model) in the note-taking mode is laggy on the E-Ink screen (the pen also works on the main screen, and it’s great there, though it has a button on it mapped to undo that’s too easy to accidentally press).

The handwriting recognition had a 0% hit rate for us, and to get notes out of it and into another app you have to copy and paste, which a) was hit and miss, and b) isn’t very slick. Proper integration with OneNote or Evernote or something would be much better.

The ereader pretty much just displays the files. You can take a cropped screengrab, but there’s no highlighting or bookmarking or other more intelligent sharing.

There’s a theoretically handy system whereby you can open it into tablet mode and get straight into using the E-Ink screen for notes or reading, but this proved too slow and unpredictable for us.

So you’ve got a slightly worse input experience than regular keys, and no real benefit from the other options provided. It just isn’t worth it.

Screen siren

What’s better is that the main 10.8-inch display is great. It’s a strong size to balance portability with actually being able to see stuff on screen, and the 2560x1440 resolution is lovely and crisp. Even the twin speakers are pretty impressive for the thin size. There’s no 3.5mm jack here, – one of the two USB-C ports provides audio output.

Lenovo says you’ll get around nine hours of battery life from the C930, and that tracks roughly with our experience. Using the E-Ink screen more than the main screen for notes would boost things more, if we could stand doing it. Part of the longevity comes from the lowpower Intel processor. Having said that, Windows itself runs fairly snappily – all the waiting we ever had to do was for the E-Ink screen – but as soon as you try any heavy lifting you’ll hit a big bottleneck. You get a lot more grunt from an Apple iPad Pro, but then you don’t get the flexibility of full Windows.

We want to like the C930 so much. We love to see a company pushing new ideas, especially in one of the best-designed little laptops we’ve ever tried (even the hinge is brilliant, particularly with that ‘knock to open’ feature), but we just can’t recommend it. If some of these design ideas go into something more akin to Microsoft’s Surface Go, Lenovo could be onto a winner. But this ain’t it.