2016-10-25

Lenovo first took the wraps off their slim and innovative Lenovo Yoga Book laptop back at IFA 2016, and we would be lying if we didn’t want to take our time and play with it. Now, we’ve had that time, and it seems we’ve come away with some really mixed feelings.

While it is quite obvious that 2 in 1’s have a secure space in the world of laptops, there isn’t a lot of room for those who want to change the game with completely different designs. We’ve seen some interesting hardware innovations like Microsoft’s Surface Book over the years, but nothing quite like what Lenovo has brought to the table.



With its ultra light and premium notebook-like design, “Instant Halo Keyboard”, and “Real pen” and stylus compatibility, Lenovo has introduced a product that is as nice as it is niche’. But does it deliver and is the Lenovo Yoga Book the perfect device for you to buy? Let’s find out!

Design



The Lenovo Yoga Book is crafted from 2 rectangles of thick carbon black metal, and the build quality is absolutely fantastic. Coming in at just 9.6mm when closed, the 2-in-1 has portability like never seen before. Because the screen is 10.1 inches, it easily slipped into my backpack with no issues whatsoever, and can even fit in the pockets of one of my larger notebooks. Though some users might be wanting something a bit larger, the device’s footprint is perfect for someone who is on the go traveling for a good portion of their lives. Whether you’re flying around the world or just love going to cafe’s, the footprint of the Yoga Book should be small enough for even the most minimalist user.



Weighing in at just 690 grams (or 1.52 pounds), the device takes the title for lightest 2-in-1 ever, and can be held easily with one hand. Because of the positioning of the logo, reading the screen vertically appears to outsiders as if you are just reading a notebook, and is great when you are chilling out in a café and want to read an article online. The portability of this laptop is unsurpassed, and should be able to make it’s way into any bag or knapsack you have on you. Many other laptops (especially gaming computers) can weigh over 12 pounds, so the extremely light form factor of the Lenovo Yoga Book should appeal to those looking to travel light.

Ports and Features

Much like laptops of a similar footprint, the Yoga Book is relatively scarce on ports and connectivity. It charges through Micro USB, which is handy for those who have a ton of cables lying around from previous Android phones and accessories, but we would have preferred USB-C with Thunderbolt 3.1 for it’s dual sided input and data transfer speeds. Thunderbolt 3 also allows for external graphics processing, which would have been very nice for those hoping to do video editing and more advanced rendering on the go.

For video output, Lenovo opted for a single mini HDMI port, which isn’t all that useful in today’s day and age. Mini Displayport or another USB-C Thunderbolt 3.1 port would have been nicer options here, as mini HDMI is relatively hard to come by in this day and age, although you could probably find a compatible cable on Amazon.

The left side of the laptop also includes a microSD card slot, which was a great choice for additional storage. The base model only comes with 64GB of storage on board, so support for up to 128 GB SD cards is a great option, especially since users can swap out their own SD cards with ease. We could see artists storing their works of various themes on each SD card, which also makes it extremely easy to transport your files physically without the need of storing them in the cloud. While a bit more base storage would have been nice, it is convenient that we can have the option to expand the storage with cheap, additional hardware.

The right side of the unit houses a 3.5mm headphone jack as any device should, 2 volume rockers, and a power button. The buttons are nice and metallic, and give a satisfying click when pressed. They have a good location in my opinion, and are generally pretty easy to handle. I would have liked to see a textured power button, however, because I often would hit one of the volume rockers instead of waking the device. There are also speakers on either side of the chassis, which we will touch on later.

Keyboard:

Lenovo took a huge leap with the Yoga Book by introducing what it is calling the “Instant Halo Keyboard”. There are no physical switches present on the keyboard section of the device, and the company has built in a touch screen into this portion instead. There are 2 modes available to users on the keyboard: touch keyboard mode and pen mode. When the keyboard mode is enabled, the seemingly blank touch screen illuminates with the shapes of a regular QUERTY-style keyboard. If you leave the keyboard untouched for a few minutes, it will fade away into the deep black screen, which is actually very useful if you are consuming media in the standard position.

After typing on this for a few days and actually writing this review on the device, I came away.. unimpressed. The vibration of each key lags behind the input significantly, and doesn’t feel natural at all. I, like many others, am used to swiping my hands across the board when reaching for the next key to press, and that is not an option at all with this keyboard. Since there is nothing to physically press and only touch, users must lift each finger off the screen fully before moving on to the next key. This is very frustrating to get used to, as it means you have to slam your fingers into a screen which doesn’t compress upon impact, which feels very strange and could cause some finger pain for heavy typists. The sluggish Atom processor didn’t help much when typing either, taking its time to actually display each input.

Overall, this is definitely a first generation feature. If Lenovo are able to improve the keyboard in their second generation of the device, they could have a good thing going for them. Until then however, we won’t be able to recommend this laptop for those who love typing, as the connectivity doesn’t even allow for external options. If you have a bluetooth keyboard to hand, this may be a different story, but we would love to see a better iteration of the feature natively present.

Trackpad:

The trackpad on the Lenovo Yoga Book fades in just like the keyboard, seemingly appearing out of nothingness when woken. Because the whole bottom of the device is a glass touch screen, the track pad area feels very nice and premium. Unfortunately, this type of glass isn’t the best surface for swiping your fingers around, and I found my index finger sticking to the screen more often then I would like. There isn’t really a better option out there though, since the whole point of the Lenovo YogaBook is to have a second screen for drawing and notes.

The right and left click areas are easily distinguishable, and work well, despite the awkward feeling of not being able to physically press them. The weirdest thing for me was trying to copy a line of text, as you have to keep your finger on the left click while moving another finger across the trackpad. This is usually easily done due to the way a left switch compresses, but having a flat set of buttons makes this quite different and a bit awkward.

Overall, this is probably the best implementation they could have accomplished for the trackpad, but it is going to take some getting used to to actually become usable.

Display(s) and Speakers:

The main display on this device is absolutely fantastic for it’s size, sporting an FHD 1920 x 1200 resolution. Offering 16.7 million pixels and a color Gamut of 70%, images are deep and vibrant, as they should be for a laptop aimed at artists and note takers. While it’s not the highest available resolution – QHD or 4k would have helped here – the Yoga Book’s glossy IPS screen looks great in most lighting situations. It can output a maximum brightness of 400 nits, which should be more than enough for most people. The laptop has step adjustments which make a measurable difference per level, so you should be able to feel comfortable in most any lighting condition.

The display is also touch sensitive, making it a pretty great tablet when flipping the keyboard section around the back. Just like any Yoga series notebook, Lenovo opted to keep the base and screen intact by allowing for pivot of the screen over the back of the keyboard. This is very useful for those looking to consume media in bed or while relaxing on the couch, and can also be very useful for artists who want to draw directly on the screen. The “Real pen” included with the device is also a stylus, which should be great for those who want to use their laptop as a platform to express their inner creativity.

The second screen doubles as a drawing surface, and works with the included “real pen” to translate your drawings and notes onto the application of your choosing. Since the 2nd screen works like a drawing tablet, artists won’t have to lug around a separate drawing tablet to get artistic. In addition, the smart pen writes just like a normal pen, but works like a smart pen to bring your notes into applications like OneNote. This is extremely useful for those that like to have a hard copy as well as an electronic copy, and writing on paper is often a completely different experience for many.

The speakers on the Lenovo Yoga Book get surprisingly loud, and have very crisp highs. The lows are a bit lacking, but that is expected for a laptop that is just 4.5mm thick when open. These should easily ring loud and clear for almost any situation, and while it can’t match the heavy bass levels of a larger, more sound-optimized laptop, we came away quite impressed.

Camera Quality

There are 2 cameras present on the device, one 8MP auto-focus enabled sensor on the keyboard section, and one 2MP fixed focus lens above the screen. While neither of these cameras are fantastic by any means, they actually get the job done pretty well for a laptop camera, delivering bright, yet relatively soft and washed out images. Again, this isn’t going to get you beautiful images or anything, but for simple video chatting and sending your friends and family quick photos of things around you, these cameras will get the job done just fine.

Performance:

The Lenovo Yoga Book packs an Intel Atom x5-Z8550 quad-core processor at 2.4 GHz which left us rather disappointed. The processor had trouble handling tasks such as writing papers, and struggled to keep up with the cursor when writing this review. 4GB of RAM is enough for most light applications, but even Google Chrome struggled with more than 1 or 2 tabs open. As there’s no graphics accelerator present – apart from the CPU’s integrated graphics – overall tasks which required more than the simplest of resources struggled to work in a fluid manor.

Model

PC Mark 8

(Home Accelerated)

PC Mark 8

(Creative Accelerated)

PC Mark 8

(Work Accelerated)

3DMark

(Fire Strike Extreme Graphics)

ATTTO

(512K read / write Mb/s) - Primary SD

ATTTO

(512K read / write Mb/s) - Secondary HDD

GeekBench 3

(Single / Multi-core)

Lenovo Ideapad

Y900

2.7GHz Intel Core i7-6820HK, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD

4952

6609

5533

9888

850 /1228

43.49 / 61.05

3315 / 13,905

Dell XPS 13

2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD

3056

4024

3915

3689

1537/304

N/A

3301/ 6932

Lenovo Yoga Book

1562

1824

1513

1214

42/160

1008/3325

We hope Lenovo can offer customisation options in the future as a better CPU and 8GB of RAM or higher would certainly improve the overall experience.. For a 2-in-1 of this portability factor, users shouldn’t expect to do much more than simple tasks, making it perfect for low users but if you need video or photo editing, this isn’t the machine for you.

The “Real Pen”

Lenovo introduced the Yoga Book as a thin, lightweight solution for artists and note-takers first. While the tablet hasn’t met many of our preferred standards in terms of overall speed, we needed to test the effectiveness of the laptop’s artistic side in order to get a complete understanding of this laptop’s target audience. Fortunately for me, I have a few artist friends who were willing to take a crack at the device as a standalone drawing tablet.

I’m really liking the pressure sensitivity. I’ve got a cheaper Wacom Bamboo tablet, and this really blows that out of the water. It’s surprising. Even though I’m using the actual pen tip and not the stylus, it still tracks my movements really well.

says Chris Luna, my roommate here in Santa Cruz.

One thing I found interesting though, is just how much this will pick up. On the paper, if I make little mistakes or scratch marks, they’re really light and you can hardly notice them. On here the pen is less forgiving. I can’t decide if I like that or not. Everything is a lot more bold, which is really great. If I could use Photoshop on this I think it would be pretty awesome.

Oh, really, it works with Photoshop? Yeah, I feel like this could rival a lot of the more expensive drawing tablets. I personally don’t think that I would need to make a physical copy while I was making a digital one, but I could see it coming in really handy for a lot of artists.

According to Chris, the Lenovo Yoga Book is an awesome drawing tablet. That’s good to hear, especially since it had so much trouble handling a lot of other programs. This really was Lenovo’s target audience, and it’s good to see that the main use case of the device works well. You can also use the stylus to draw on the screen, but we recommend using the keyboard surface, as that is were the unit seems to track the best.

Lenovo also includes a magnetic paper pad as you can see in the image. It does a good job of keeping the paper in place for things like taking notes, but isn’t too necessary if you are doing drawings. You can order replacement paper that fits the paper pad exclusively, but at $15 for 75 pieces, it would probably be better to just use your own sketchbook.

The tip of the pen is a bit weird to remove. You use the cap of the pen itself to extract the ink tips, and can also replace it with the stylus tip which comes pre-installed. There isn’t really anywhere to store the pen on the laptop itself unlike Microsoft’s Surface line, so if you need a new one, it will cost you another $40.

Heat/Noise:

The laptop stayed cool and quiet throughout our usage, which was great when working in a quiet room or lecture hall. I did notice a very light amount of heat when the laptop began to struggle, but it mostly stayed silent through the whole bit. While this could be seen as a plus for many, efficiency is more important to me than noise, and I would have liked to see some more fans in the chassis to keep it running better.

Overall, heat and noise were not much of an issue here, but a bit of noise would have been fine for better efficiency.

Battery Life:

Like many 2-in-1 laptops of this caliber, the battery life is absolutely fantastic. Lenovo touts 13 hours of normal usage, and while we likely got more around 10 on our few days we had the laptop with us, that was more than enough to get through an entire work day. While the CPU in the device might not be the beast to beat, its efficiency is fantastic, and should last most users for more than a whole day’s usage.

The Lenovo Yoga Book sports a 8500 mAh battery, and Lenovo says it has a standby time of over 70 days, which is great for any laptop. We didn’t notice any significant battery drain while carrying the laptop around in standby, so we would have to agree with these claims, although we obviously cannot prove them in time for this review.

Price and Specifications:

The Lenovo Yoga Book costs $549.99. This isn’t the most expensive laptop by any means, but you really have to stop and consider what you are using it for. If you want this device strictly for its use as a laptop computer, there are likely many other products at this price point that will suit your needs just fine, if not better. Solutions that combine a tablet, laptop and drawing pad are a bit harder to find however, and if you’re looking for an all-in-one drawing solution that allows you to use  other programs like Photoshop and Illustrator on their own, you’re going to have a harder search.

The specs aren’t the greatest, but if it’s a specific niche product you’re looking for, you’ll be hard pressed to find anything else like it.

Display

10.1 inch FHD IPS panel (1920x1200)

Processor

Intel® Atom™ x5-Z8550 Processor(2M Cache, Quad-Core, Up to 2.4 GHz)

Graphics

Intel HD Graphics 400

RAM

4 GB LPDDR3

Internal Storage

64GB SSD

Operating system

Windows 10 Home Edition with Lenovo extras

Webcam

Rear : 8 MP Auto-Focus

Front : 2 MP Fixed-Focus

Connectivity options

Micro USB, Micro SD, Mini HDMI, 3.5mm headphone jack, 3.5mm microphone jack, SD card reader,Gigabit Ethernet port, Wireless n/a/ac 1535 (b/g/n/ac), Bluetooth 4.0, Proprietary charging port

Battery

8500 mAh Li-ion Polymer

Speakers

Dolby Audio Premium

Dimensions & weight

256.6 x 9.6 x 170.8 mm, 1.52 pounds

Final Verdict:

Lenovo’s Yoga Book sports an innovative design with features that are extremely useful to many creatives and those who need an extraordinarily portable form factor. Its futuristic keyboard design isn’t the best right now, but with the correct amount of tweaking and improvement, it could help to pioneer a new slim keyboard form factor. The screen is bright and vibrant, and should be great for media consumption, along with its Dolby-enabled speakers.

Overall, if you’re a creative who draws and takes notes more than types, this could be the laptop for you. At $549, the innovative features present in the device help to appeal to a niche community of artists and designers, but won’t work well for heavier power users. The battery life is great and the screen is beautiful, but the processor struggles even under light conditions, making it hard to recommend this 2-in-one for anything more than drawing or note taking.

There are many other laptops that could pack a technically harder punch at this price point, but for those looking for a slim and light laptop with a fantastic screen and great battery life, this laptop delivers on quite a few levels. Though I am not interested in something like this for myself, there are likely many of you out there that would. What do you think of the Lenovo YogaBook and do you plan to buy one? Let us know your views in the comments below!

Buy the Lenovo Yoga Book!

The post Lenovo Yoga Book Review – Innovative design, first generation execution appeared first on TabTimes.

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