Lenovo Yoga Pad
The fold-away keyboard is a novel idea for Android, and the price is right – it simply doesn't work well enough
While some tablets offer a keyboard as an expensive optional extra, the Yoga Book comes with one bolted directly on to the screen. You can use it like a laptop, or fold it back to emulate the classic tablet form factor.
It’s a neat idea, but there’s a catch: the “keyboard” is a completely flat touch-sensitive surface. Its keys have no edges and no physical travel, so it’s very fiddly to type on: you do get a little haptic buzz when a keypress is registered, but it’s not a patch on the usual clip-on offerings.
The folding design also makes the Yoga Book one of this month’s thickest contenders (tying with the Amazon Fire 7), and at 690g it’s the heaviest too, weighing more even than the gargantuan 12.9in iPad Pro.
Interestingly, the Yoga Book is sold in both Android and Windows 10 versions. That’s probably why Lenovo has chosen an Intel Atom CPU to power the whole shebang. This is far from a front-runner in the performance stakes, but with a Geekbench single-core score of 1,137 and a multi-core score of 3,230 it’s powerful enough to run standard Android apps smoothly. Gaming performance is similarly fine: with a GFXBench score of 15fps, you’ll be able to play 3D games, but for demanding titles you might need to turn the resolution down.
And even though the Yoga Book has one of the largest batteries here, it gave us only 8hrs 59mins of video playback away from the mains. The iPad, with its near-identical battery capacity, lasted six hours longer.
Perhaps the Yoga Book’s best point is its screen: the 10.1in IPS panel is quite arresting, with its 420cd/m² maximum brightness and 1,229:1 contrast ratio. Its 224ppi pixel density means you can make out the pixels if you peer closely, but it’s clean enough to satisfy in everyday use. For media consumption, the hinge makes it easy to position the screen at a convenient viewing angle, and the Dolby Atmos speakers go nice and loud without distorting. A micro-HDMI socket lets you hook up an external screen, too.
Lenovo deserves credit for a fresh take on Android. And at £330 the Yoga Book is a cost-effective way to get a tablet with a keyboard. The price also includes Lenovo’s “Real Pen”: clip a sheet of paper onto the keyboard area and you can capture digital copies of your physical notes and drawings.
But in truth, I’d rather use an on-screen keyboard than try to compose my emails on the Yoga Book’s flat, unresponsive keyboard surface – and that makes the whole thing pointless.