3-in-1 Yoga Book
In-depth review of 2019’s weirdest laptop
PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from lenovo.com
For a while, it looked as though the Lenovo Yoga Book wasn’t coming back. The ultra-thin 2-in-1 was out of stock for months at a time and there was no sign of a replacement. But the line has been unexpectedly revived with the release of the unique Yoga Book C930. We gave the last Lenovo Yoga Book ( see issue 268, p58) top marks for
versatility and innovation but weren’t so keen on its sluggish performance and virtual keyboard. The Yoga Book C930 is a significant step forward, with a higher resolution screen and an E Ink secondary display that switches between keyboard, drawing and ebook modes. The price has doubled since, however, and I’m still struggling to find a justification.
Closed book
Admittedly, nothing looks like the Yoga Book. Closed, it’s just two slabs of iron-grey aluminium held together by Lenovo’s funky “watchband”
hinge. It’s a tiny thing and slides easily into an A4 envelope, with ample room to spare on all sides.
To open it, you rap twice on the lid with a knuckle. This causes the lid to pop open a crack, and from there the screen can easily be lifted into position. Besides looking cool, this knock-to-open function is cleverly designed, using two opposing magnets that are forced apart by successive taps. To open the laptop in less dramatic fashion, you can simply hold down the volume button on the right-hand edge.
Once open, you’re presented with two screens. Above is the 10.8in IPS display, boxed in on all sides by conspicuously large bezels. The webcam lives above the screen but there’s no camera privacy shutter or secondary IR camera for face unlock (a step back from the first-generation Yoga Book).
Second display
Where the keyboard would normally be is a smooth 10.8in panel. This is the “Flexible E Ink Mobius” touch display, which incorporates a keyboard and drawing functions. I can see the appeal due to the sheer versatility on offer. But, in practice, this is where things start to go wrong.
I’ll start with the virtual keyboard. There are two layouts available, modern or classic, and you can also choose between black or white styles. Either way, there’s no getting around the slow key response, which lags behind even a modest typing speed.
And since these aren’t real keys but rather sensors on a panel, they have no tactile feedback, making it immensely difficult to touch type on. When typing, I found myself looking down almost constantly to make sure my hands stayed in the right place. You can set the keyboard to vibrate when you hit a key but even with this set to maximum strength there’s not enough sensation to make you feel as if you’re actually typing.
The virtual touchpad is also abnormally small and frustrating to use. In the “modern” keyboard layout it’s just a small button that expands when you tap it, swallowing the spacebar and then disappearing when any other key is pressed.
Annoyingly, the optional Precision Pen stylus can’t interact with the E Ink keyboard. It’s irritating because when you’re already holding the stylus, tapping a key is a lot more intuitive than bringing up the primary display’s on-screen keyboard.
The Pen’s main function is for drawing on the E Ink Note surface, of course, and it works perfectly well here. This “Note” mode is not without its problems, however. To begin with, the Yoga Book C930 is slow to swap between keyboard and note functions. That’s if it loads at all. Many times I’ve tapped the Note button on the E Ink panel and been presented with a blank display for five seconds, only to be brought back to the keyboard. When I did make it to Note mode, I found it was accurate and responsive, both for drawing and writing.
There’s a button that allows you to draw with your fingers, and Note mode also has a screen-grab function for annotation purposes. Simply press one button and the main display is mirrored onto the secondary display. Of course, the E Ink Note mode is black and white, which may not be an issue when annotating a Word document or PDF, but the lack of colour is hardly ideal for designers and artists.
And now on to the third and final function of the E Ink display: reading ebooks.
“If you aren’t fussed about colour accuracy and don’t have strip lighting above your desk, you’ll enjoy using the primary display”
Lenovo doesn’t list all the formats you can read in this mode but it’s definitely compatible with EPUB, MOBI, TXT and PDF. Crucially, though, it definitely isn’t compatible with Kindle ebooks.
Reading ebooks and PDFs on the display is awkward compared to a dedicated e-reader. It’s unwieldy to hold in one hand, and I found it easier to prop up the laptop in “tent” mode and read hands-free. Page turning works by tapping the corners but this often elicits no response. The only plus side is that, due to the sheer size of the E Ink display, you can view two pages side by side in landscape mode.
Main display
The Yoga Book C930’s primary display is a more regular affair. It’s a 10.8in, 2,560 x 1,600 touchenabled IPS panel, which means it’s the size of a typical tablet display – not ideal for work. Nor is it the best quality panel we’ve tested. While it covers an excellent 97.2% of the sRGB colour gamut, it has a tendency to oversaturate greens, reds and yellows. It’s also reflective, a fact not helped by its weak peak brightness of 308cd/m2. That’s fine for a laptop that’s designed to be used inside, such as the Asus VivoBook S15 ( see p56), but not great for an ultraportable. However, it’s still a pleasant screen to gaze at. A 1,174:1 contrast ratio helps images to look punchy, and if you aren’t fussed about colour accuracy and don’t have strip lighting above your desk then you’ll enjoy using it. If your Yoga Book is deskbound, though, you’ll need to invest in a port replicator. In addition to a dual microSD and SIM slot on the left edge, there are two USB-C slots – one on either side – but
one of those will usually be occupied by the power supply. That leaves you with a single connector to plug in a peripheral device. Note there’s no 3.5mm jack, so you’ll need Bluetooth headphones to listen to audio privately. Frankly, I recommend headphones whether you’re in public or not, because the audio output of the Yoga Book C930’s dual side-mounted speakers could be better. Although not abysmal, it’s not as loud or crisp a sound as you’d expect from a laptop costing over £1,000.
It’s disappointing the Precision Pen stylus (£90) isn’t bundled either, since you’re already spending so much. This is a battery-powered metallic stylus, slightly longer and thicker than a Bic Biro, that has two buttons and sticks to the laptop’s back magnetically. The Precision Pen isn’t essential for standard touchscreen activities, but you’ll need it to take full advantage of the E Ink input display.
Scrimping on speed
Lenovo has scrimped when it comes to internal specifications and it shows in the benchmark results. The C930 is equipped with an Intel Core i5-7Y54, a low-power dual-core chipset that was released in mid-2016. This is backed by only 4GB of RAM. These specs make it the slowest performing laptop we’ve reviewed in ages.
In our in-house benchmarks, the Yoga Book C930 achieved a paltry overall score of 25. Laptops typically take a couple of hours to get through our tests, but this device took almost three days to finish the multitasking test where we simultaneously downscale a video, edit photos and watch a movie. By comparison, the Microsoft Surface Pro 6 scored 69 overall and that’s on the low-end for laptops in this price bracket. The Yoga Book C930 can handle multitab browsing, but forget about anything remotely demanding.
Geekbench also demonstrated the Yoga Book C930’s sub-par internals. It produced a multicore score of 6,500, while the 12.9in iPad Pro and Microsoft Surface Pro 6 managed double that.
It’s a similar story in graphics benchmarks. The Yoga Book C930’s CPU has an integrated Intel HD 615 Graphics chip that could only reach an average on-screen frame rate of 20fps in the GFXBench Manhattan test and 40fps off-screen (at 1080p). Compare that with the 59fps (on-screen) and 209fps (off-screen) scored by the 12.9in iPad Pro and you can see how ill-equipped the Yoga Book C930 is for gaming. A score of 16fps in the undemanding 720p Dirt: Showdown benchmark shows that this laptop is best suited to low-end games.
There was one bright light: the Yoga Book ships with a 256GB SSD that returned sequential file read speeds of 1,200MB/sec and write speeds of 531MB/sec. That’s faster than the Surface Pro 6, which didn’t manage 200MB/sec in the write tests.
With the battery life results, it’s back to the bad news, unfortunately. In our standardised battery rundown benchmark, the Yoga Book C930 lasted only 6hrs 16mins of continuous video playback. That means it’s hardly the all-day “marathon” machine that Lenovo promised, as the laptop powered down two hours earlier than the Surface Pro 6 in the same test. The 12.9in iPad Pro, on the other hand, made it through to 10hrs 20mins.
“There’s no denying that the Yoga Book C930 is unique. It’s light, admirably slim and – thanks to the E Ink Mobius display – versatile”
Unique isn’t enough
Despite its many shortcomings, there’s no denying the Lenovo Yoga Book C930 is unique. It’s light, admirably slim and – thanks to the E Ink Mobius display – versatile. The lack of a physical keyboard is hard to reconcile, however, and if Lenovo plans to make more Yoga Books then it needs to improve E Ink typing; writing anything longer than an email is painful.
The horribly slow speeds are another major downfall of the Yoga Book C930, with the aged dual-core Y-Series chip giving it the performance of an Android tablet. No matter how useful the E Ink display may be for designers and artists – and that’s debatable – it isn’t sufficient justification for charging £1,300 for this level of performance and inconvenience. SPECIFICATIONS Dual-core 1.2GHz Intel Core i5-7Y54 processor Intel UHD Graphics 615 10.8in 2,560 x 1,600 touchscreen IPS display 10.8in 1,920 x 1,080 E Ink touchscreen 256GB PCIe SSD 4GB LPDDR3 RAM 2MP webcam 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.2 microSD slot 36Whr battery Windows 10 Home 260 x 179 x 9.9mm (WDH) 775g 1yr C&R warranty