2016-10-17



Give Lenovo credit for trying. Its new Yoga Book is the most purely fascinating tablet to come along in years. It is an unabashed gadget — a weird, delightful little thing that feels like a product of passion.

At a time when consumer tech is increasingly commoditized, it is wholly refreshing to interact with a device that takes genuine risks. There isn’t another device like it.

There’s a reason for that, though. And it’s not that Lenovo is simply more imaginative than any of its peers.

SEE ALSO: I tried two incredible MacBook Pro alternatives running Windows 10 — here's how they compare



Let’s take a step back. The Lenovo Yoga Book is a 2-in-1 tablet, a la Microsoft’s Surface Pro. It’s built in a way that blurs the line between tablet and laptop — if you want to use it as the former, you just fold its keyboard behind its display. Both of those are attached to a fully rotatable hinge, much like the other PCs in Lenovo’s Yoga series.

What makes the Yoga Book so charming is the fact that it has no physical keys. Instead, it has a display, and a second touch surface that can become a virtual keyboard or a Wacom drawing tablet. One press of an icon alternates between the two. When you flip the device out of a clamshell shape, the LED keys just turn off. It’s a lovely piece of design.

Having no mechanical bits makes the Yoga Book supremely portable. It weighs 1.5 pounds, and measures just 9.6 millimeters with the two surfaces closed together. The device itself is made from a smooth, sturdy aluminum, and that classy silver hinge prevents any sort of creakiness. It all looks mature and feels fantastic.



But alas, eventually you have to turn it on. Then you start to see why so few companies have attempted a device like this in the first place.

Software is a part of it. The Yoga Book comes in two variants: one that costs $499 and runs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, and one that costs $549 and runs Windows 10. The specs are identical for each. The idea is to pick the former if you’d rather something for leisure, and the latter if you’d prefer something for productivity. For this review, I tested the Android version.

It’s a bit of a mess. Android on tablets has always had issues with proper app support; in far too many cases, it just feels like a blown-up phone OS. Lenovo adds a few apps and moves a few buttons around to make the software play nicer with a keyboard and mouse, but it can only do so much.

Its version of “multitasking,” for instance, is to let you collapse a (very small) handful of apps into phone-sized, non-adjustable windows. You can pin those to the screen, but it still feels like the hacky workaround that it is. That the Yoga Book starts with old software doesn’t help, as Android 7.0 Nougat’s multi-window mode helps with this. If anything, though, it’s a prime of example of why the rumored Andromeda OS, which could work the laptop-friendly parts of Chrome OS into Android, could be useful.

Windows 10 would seem to be the more natural choice then, but that’d put more stress on the Yoga Book’s mediocre specs. The device runs on a 2.4GHz Intel Atom X5 processor and 4GB of RAM. It’s enough to do the basic web browsing and video viewing without too much delay, but even on Android, it’s never outright fast, and definitely not where a $500 tablet should be.

Benchmark tests put it on the level of a flagship phone from 2014, in fact. Modern mobile games like “Lara Croft Go” consistently stuttered whenever things intensified onscreen. Don’t count on Photoshop running with aplomb, either.

As you might expect from a device this thin, there isn’t much in the way of connectivity. You get a microSD slot to expand on the 64GB of base storage, a micro-HDMI port, and a headphone jack. Disappointingly, Lenovo’s also opted for an increasingly outdated microUSB port instead of the faster and more versatile USB-C.

In any case, you have to get used to that all-touch keyboard. For what it is, it’s good. It doesn’t lag, it smartly uses haptic feedback to let you know your presses are registering, and it’s much faster than using the onscreen alternative.

Still, that’s all relative. It’s cramped, for one — I constantly had to look down to hit character and function keys, which slows the whole process down. It has trouble recognizing presses from fingernails, too, and pressing against a harder surface for an extended period of time can put some fatigue on your fingertips. Everything is tolerable, but it won’t stop you from reaching for your laptop when it comes time to get real work done.

Less tolerable is its accompanying touchpad, which is maddeningly hypersensitive. Any time my palms brushed up against it while typing, it’d send the onscreen cursor wildly flying about. Again, this is a 10-inch device. I’d usually contort my hands just to avoid touching it. It also doesn’t seem to support multi-touch gestures — or if it does, things like pinch-to-zoom or two-finger scrolling certainly don’t work consistently. You can do the basic scrolling and selecting, but that’s it.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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