Lenovo Yoga Book
Lenovo Yoga Book is a super portable two-in-one laptop/ hybrid tablet. This includes a Wacom sketching pad that can instantly transform into a QWERTY keyboard. The result is a fun, highly portable device that instantly appeals to creative professionals. But it’s not nearly as practical as Lenovo makes it out to be.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be an option for your secondary or travel computer, instead of a Chromebook, iPad or other small-screen budget laptops.
It’s made of magnesium-aluminum alloy. It is a slim 10.1-inch and has full HD multi-touch display. It is built with the same watchband-style hinge that Lenovo’s bigger Yoga laptops have. This is what makes it a “convertible” : you can fold it into a tablet, use the keyboard as a prop for the display, or just use it in traditional laptop mode. But unlike 13-inch or 15-inch laptops, having these options makes sense with the Yoga Book. It feels like a tablet when you fold the keyboard back.
The most striking feature of this hybrid laptop is its keyboard or at least the space on the clamshell body where the keyboard would normally be. Instead, there’s a completely flat, button-free surface that alternates between a drawing tablet and a touch-powered backlit keyboard. It’s a bit like an iPad’s on-screen keyboard, except that it doesn’t actually take over part of the screen.
Apart from the keyboard, the Yoga Book includes a standard set of components for a budget laptop, with an Intel Atom x5 processor, 64GB of solid-state storage and 4GB of RAM. The price reflects these lower-end internal components, at $499 in the US for the Android version and $549 for the Windows 10 version.
it weighs just 1.5 pounds(680 grams) and 0.9 mm thick. It was called as “The Book” by the Lenovo executives before it was officially named.
In general, when you are working with such a tiny laptop, there are some sacrifices. firstly, these cannot balance perfectly on our laps as they are too small. Like the Apple’s 12-inch MacBook, there is a shortage of port. It has a Micro-USB charging port, an HDMI port, a microSD port, and a headphone jack. No full-size USB or not even USB Type-C. Generally, the Yoga Book is available with a SIM card slot, but unfortunately, this isn’t found with that.
Intel Atom processor is the one which is in both Android and Windows model of this computer. The 4GB of RAM is suitable for the Android and not completely for the Windows. Once you put the Yoga Book into normal laptop mode, the matte black lower panel turns into a glowing touchpad keyboard. It also vibrates when you tap on it. This gives a sense of haptic feedback, though it feels like the whole panel itself is moving, not the isolated keys you’re tapping at.
The keyboard panel also doubles as a Wacom surface, which requires you to use Lenovo’s “Real Pen” stylus. And you can put a real pen tip in and write on a piece of paper or thin notepad over the panel. As a journalist, I liked the idea of opening up a physical notebook, slapping it on top of the Yoga Book, and taking notes that way, but in reality this surface is probably more appealing to designers or people who use styluses and digitizer pads more often.
The battery life of this book remains for almost 15 hours which any other device can not at all provide in any case. Despite of its long battery life and its looks, it is a long producers of utility laptops at its core. It doesn’t have the same design pedigree like some of its PC competitors have.
The stylus pen is eccentric. In order to switch from a stylus pen tip to a “real” pen tip, you have to grab the tip with a small hole in the pen cap and pull the tip out. More than once I forgot to switch from the “real” pen tip back to the stylus tip, and ended up scribbling real ink all over the Wacom panel. The top of the pen cap sometimes unscrewed itself, letting tiny metal components come out.
The Yoga Book struggles as a Windows 10 laptop as it takes more time to boot up. Lenovo has given its own software layer on top of this to give the mobile OS more of a desktop feel. This includes an app dock at the bottom of the screen, along with multi-window support.
Some of the many popular apps like Google search, YouTube, Twitter, Docs, Kindle, and Slack don’t work with the multi-window mode. Whereas Gmail, Netflix, Evernote, and Chrome do support this. Despite Lenovo’s boasts of 60–70 percent compatibility, it seems that these apps are more exceptions than the norm.
Even the apps that work in multi-window mode do so in a limited way. They’re narrow, vertical boxes, and you can neither resize or snap them together as on Windows 10. Some of the apps, like Netflix, just don’t make sense as a narrow box.
Lenovo has said that it plans to build a family of Yoga Book devices, and this feels very much like the first generation of that. It needs refinement and more intuitive software. May be a couple more ports, too, even though that may sacrifice thinness.
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