Lenovo Yoga Book
Portability and great design make this Yoga hybrid fit for purpose
With laptops getting touchscreens and tablets getting keyboards, computers and mobile devices are becoming almost indistinguishable. And now here’s one that truly is both: you can buy the Yoga Book for £450 running Android 6.0 Marshmallow, or for £550 running Windows 10. It’s basically the same machine, but with a choice of desktop or mobile operating system. And whichever you pick, it would be unlike any portable computer you’ve seen before.
Instead of a keyboard, the Yoga Book’s sleek, stiffly hinged metal case pairs a touchscreen with an electromagnetic resonance (EMR) panel, which you can use to type or draw on. In keyboard mode, the keys appear, as if by magic, as illuminated outlines. When you type, you can feel the keys click – or sort of buzz, anyway. It’s enough to make the sensation slightly more real than typing on a glass tablet screen – and it avoids getting fingerprints all over the display. With a bit of practice we found we could enter text quite comfortably, though not as fast as with physical keys.
Tap the button at the top right and the keys disappear, leaving you to scribble with the included stylus. This feels incredibly precise, and because your marks appear on the screen above, your hand doesn’t get in the way. You also have the option of clipping an A5 notebook on top of the pad and writing with real ink, much like the Wacom Bamboo Spark (see our review, Issue 467), making a digital carbon copy at the same time. In the Android version we tested, which is only just arriving in the UK, your scrawls appear in a special Lenovo app. On the Windows model – already widely available – they go into Microsoft Onenote.
The Yoga Book’s screen is quite compact for a laptop, at less than 11 inches, and not as sharp as today’s leading tablets. Nevertheless, its Full Hd-plus resolution looks crisp, even if its 81 per cent SRGB colour coverage won’t satisfy serious photo editors. Considering the Yoga Book’s price, though, this is all perfectly acceptable, as is the modest Intel Atom processor, which is faster than the version we’ve seen in many previous budget laptop-tablet hybrids.
This isn’t the machine for video editing or playing 3D games, but for general office tasks and web browsing it’s fine, and it lasted a decent seven hours 22 minutes in our video-playback test. Combined with its extraordinarily low weight, that makes this a very practical go-anywhere device.
VERDICT: Innovative, useful and very portable, the Yoga Book won’t suit everyone but it’s a welcome new concept in laptops
★★★★★
ALTERNATIVE: Acer Switch Alpha 12 £600 This pricier Windows 10 hybrid has a faster i3 processor and sharper 12in screen
A lightweight hybrid with optional operating systems and a unique keyboard