Lenovo Yoga Book Review (Windows 10 Version)

This is Lisa from Mobile Tech Review and this is perhaps a taste of the future. It has a ways to go though before we're there yet. This is the Lenovo Yoga Book. Much talked about and, well, it's one of the few products that actually tries to be different and do some innovative new things. When you see the 10.1-inch Lenovo Yoga Book, you'll want it. It's that good looking and that unique. From the matte carbon fiber, black magnesium alloy, stiff casing, to the Watchman hinge, it looks like something that might cost $1,000 or $2,000, really. Instead, it's just $500 for the Android version and $550 for the Windows 10 model. They use the same hardware, by the way. It's just the OS that's different. If you go with the Android Yoga Book, you'll have a few other colors to choose from, like champagne gold or gunmetal gray, but I particularly like the carbon black. That's the only color available for the Windows model that we happen to have. It looks like a classy journal book. This is a convertible like Lenovo's other Yoga laptops. It does laptop, tablet, tent, and presentation modes via a 360-degree hinge, and the capacitive keyboard and trackpad are automatically disabled when you rotate it out of laptop position. At least they should. Our early model had some issues with forgetting to do so, but we expect that Lenovo will get those drivers working and tweaked. The Yoga Book has a 1.44 GHz Intel Atom X5-Z8550 CPU with boost to 2.4 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of internal storage, dual-band Wi-Fi, A11AC, Bluetooth, and an optional multi-carrier 4G LTE with a nano SIM card slot. It weighs just 1.5 pounds, which is 960 grams, and is a mind-bogglingly skinny 9.6 mm. That's 0.38 inches, yet it's super stiff and sturdy. Ports are scarce, though, and this is clearly not meant to be your main laptop. There's just a lone USB port, and it's micro-USB at that, so you'll need a micro-USB to USB 2.0 dongle to use USB peripherals. That's not in the box. And that port also doubles as the charging port, so you can't charge and use peripherals at the same time. There's also a 3.5mm combo mic headphone jack, micro HDMI, and a micro SD card slot. Alas, there's no USB-C, and that seems kind of old-fashioned and less versatile compared to recent competition from the 12-inch MacBook, the ASUS ZenBook 3, and the HP Spectre. The YogaBook comes with a digital pen, the YogaBook pad, which is a pad of paper with a magnetic holder, ballpoint pen nibs, the standard digital nib is pre-installed in the pen, and a smartphone-sized charger with a too-short USB cable. Open up the YogaBook, and you'll see that there's no keyboard in the traditional sense. That smooth surface has the faint etched outline of a full keyboard, and when you use the halo keyboard, it lights up and seems to appear from nowhere, which is kind of cool. When it's not lit up, you can see the faint stenciling that is the keyboard. Lenovo calls the bottom area the Create Pad because with the press of a button, there's a little pen icon on it. It turns into a Wacom EMR digitizer that works with the included pen and has palm rejection and 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity. The IPS 1920 x 1200 touchscreen supports Lenovo's AnyPen technology. The included pen works there, albeit without pressure sensitivity or palm rejection, so no resting your hand on the screen, no variable line width. Not really great for artists. It's okay for note-takers though, but not ideal. It works with most any implement that has a modicum of metal in the tip, ballpoint pens, lead pencils. Lenovo has used AnyPen in previous Android tablets that we've reviewed, and they used to say, oh, go ahead, use a screwdriver, use scissors. They're not inviting us to do that here, and I honestly really have no desire to do such crazy things. If you do use the ink pen tip, you can see it leaves a little bit of ink on the screen, but that does clean off. Personally, I would just use the digital nib with the IPS screen. So what's with that pen nib, by the way, that's actually an ink pen? The YogaBooks Bottom Cree 8-Pad Digitizer uses similar technology to the Wacom Bamboo Slate, which is a separate device you can buy, and it's compatible with iOS and Android. You place a pad of paper on it, everyday normal paper, not special stuff. You can use graph paper or art paper, and write on it and draw with the ballpoint pen insert in the Wacom pen. Lenovo uses a magnetic book holder with lined A5 paper, but you can use, like I said, anything you want. And you can get refills, too, from Lenovo for the paper. And yes, the pen really works through an entire pad of paper. That pad of paper is 75 sheets. Nice. Whatever you draw right on the pad will appear on the screen with really good fidelity. It's pretty impressive stuff, honestly. My question is, how many people need that feature, though? You can use OneNote, ArtRage, Adobe PDF, or Photoshop if you're using the Windows version to use these features. It's up to you what application you're using when you're writing or drawing. Lenovo says they're targeting the YogaBook at young professionals, people aged maybe 15 to 35. The people who, you know, grew up with the iPad. So I get why they'd expect those folks to be comfortable typing on a capacitive zero-travel keyboard, but I'm not so sure that those are the same folks that are really wedded to pen and paper. The feature seems better suited to older users who've never grown comfortable with writing on glass screens. The CreatePad Surface, should you choose to not put paper on top of it, has a non-stick feel similar to Wacom's USB digitizer tablets that plug into a PC or Mac like the Intuos. I don't think anybody would want to take notes that way, though, because you're writing blind. You'd have to move your gaze from the tablet portion to the screen to see what you're writing. So, not so good there. Some pro photographers still use Wacom USB tablets like the Intuos, and I suspect they're rolling that way because they're using Macs that don't have touchscreen products available in Mac OS version like, you know, something competing like Surface Pro 4 or the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga. Lenovo argues, though, that it's better this way, effectively the old-fashioned USB tablet way, working blind on a blank surface because your hand doesn't block your view. I haven't heard note-takers complain that their hand is blocking their notepad, nor do sketch artists and painters complain about their pencils and brushes. Someone who does paint and draw digitally like myself, I feel that the way many graphic artists do, the day we got the ability to draw directly on the screen was Liberation Day. A photo editor might prefer not to block her view when making a careful masking selection on a photo, but as someone who also edits photos and is seriously into photography and Photoshop advanced use, I still find the indirection of a separate drawing pad unpleasant. The capacitive keyboard is exactly like the one on screen on the iPad or Surface Pro 4 or any Android tablet, only bigger because you get to use the whole area. There's no worrying about blocking what you're seeing on screen, right? The YogaBook has a 10-inch netbook footprints and a keyboard size to match, a little bit wider since it goes nearly edge-to-edge though. I'm very comfortable typing on Android and iPad screens, so the Lenovo capacitive keyboard's fine for short typing sessions, but I tried for days and I couldn't come to love it for long-form writing, such as writing long reviews like I do for our website. Why? It has haptic feedback and auditory feedback. Too loud, but you can turn that off. So you have some sense of making positive contact with each virtual key, but that's it for tactile feel. Even the old Surface Pro touch cover was more tactile. Okay, you know, I might be able to live with that, but it's hard to touch type when you're often looking at the keyboard to check your finger position. Okay, maybe I could live with that too, but should I have to just because it looks so cool and allows for a thinner device? I don't know. The deal breaker for long-form typing is that you can't rest your fingers ever so lightly on the keys, you know, your home finger keys when you're touch typing, because they're sensitive and they're going to register the slightest touch, just like a tablet screen. That means keeping your elbows bent at constant 90 degrees and raising your hands completely off the keys, which is a very tiring thing for the shoulders. Then forget about typing on bouncy trains or buses. The Halo keyboard would be much better if it used something like force touch. Require a bit of pressure to actuate the keys and that would allow touch typists to gently rest their fingers on the home keys, you know, and just make slight contact with other keys without creating a mess of word jumble. Oh well, it really looks cool though. Like the keyboard, the trackpad is a virtual capacitive thing with right and left click buttons on the sides rather than along the bottom, because there's no room really at the bottom and the height of the trackpad is already too short to be very comfortable. Supports two finger gesture of scrolling with two fingers and that's about it, but there's not even enough room to really do that very easily. The big problem here is that the trackpad is very close to the spacebar and it automatically disables a trackpad if it thinks you've touched a keyboard key, which we see even on traditional laptops, but that timeout is really long and the trackpad's so close to the spacebar you are just going to be hitting the spacebar all the time. So say you're dragging a file mid-drag, suddenly it stops dead. You've dropped your file somewhere you don't know where because it's disabled the trackpad. Clearly Lenovo noticed that because there's this little dot in the center of the trackpad that you type to make the trackpad come alive again. This is torturous. It's not awesome. Now if you're using the Android version where the trackpad is really not so necessary, it's a very touch-centric OS for the screen and you're probably not mousing around so much, it's okay. But with the Windows version, speaking of Android, you have your choice and honestly I think Lenovo first designed this to be an Android tablet and that is the better fit. The Intel Atom CPU, four gigs of RAM, which would be capacious for Android but is just a bare minimum for Windows. The slower eMMC kind of storage that's not great at Windows is fine for Android. That all works. Plus Lenovo has some neat customizations. You can write on the paper pad while the screens turn off to save battery power and there's also something called touch palettes, a utility to kind of help with autocorrect because you're going to make typos. But at least there's no bloatware in the Windows version. I know Lenovo took a knock for their super fish issue with some yoga models of last year. There's nothing here except for the Halo keyboard application and the drivers necessary to make the thing work. There's not even an updater utility, which I kind of wish there was because most people don't bother going to the website to get their software updates. In terms of performance, well the Intel Atom is, it's a quad core and it's 1.44 gigahertz again, but it sits well below the Intel Core M. It's about a third to a fourth of the speed of an Intel Core i5. This is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. It's okay if you're using a program like ArtRage. That's a pretty lightweight art program. You'll still see some pen lag and tracking lag there, but Photoshop, if you're using like a 200 meg photo with layers and you want to start drawing on top of it, it is going to start to lag. It's just really, this is not an artist's tool per se, a serious artist tool for for fun, casual dabbling. Yes, but for real art, not really so much. Now it's better on Android actually, where ArtRage runs pretty well and you've got Sketchbook for Android and performance is better with those mobile applications. So why did Lenovo use the slow Atom CPU in the Windows Yoga book? Well, because they were bringing it over from the world of Android and it helps to keep the price down a lot. And it is pretty neat that they made this thing so affordable. Also no fan. Well, that's true of the Core M2, but even less heat. This thing is so small, you're going to be holding it in your hands all the time. It doesn't get hot ever. Sometimes it'll get a little warm and that's about it. Also battery life. Battery life is noticeably better. I mean, most Windows laptops, you're talking six hours of battery life, maybe seven. This one, Lenovo says 12 to 15 hours and in truth, we managed 10 to 12 hours doing productivity tasks with the Windows version. If you're going to be editing stuff in Photoshop or if you're gonna be playing games, it'll be shorter. The display is actually a very attractive one and it matches the specs we usually see on $1,000 Ultrabooks and tablets. 400 nits of claimed brightness. We measured 386 with our colorimeter and that's pretty close. That's pretty good. Color gamut is 93% of sRGB and 91% of Adobe RGB. Again, you're looking at more expensive tablets usually if you're going to get that kind of quality, at least in the world of Windows. Contrast is good at 690 to 1. The white point, hardware white point's too high, but calibration fixes that, so I'm not too worried about it. So really nice display there. Just wish it had pressure sensitivity on the display and palm rejection. So in the end, the Lenovo Yoga Book stirs emotions like few other recent pieces of consumer electronics. I mean, practicality or need be damned. I just want one. I seriously applaud Lenovo for taking a chance on a product like the Yoga Book and I want them to continue evolving it. It has a lot of promise, but right now I feel like the Windows version is an answer to a problem few of us had. The main advantage of the virtual keyboard, beyond good looks, is that it allows for a rigid yet insanely thin laptop. Okay. Unless you type very little, I'm not sure it's worth that trade-off. Maybe we'll see laptops of the future with something like force touch for the keyboard and that'll make typing easier and more natural. The Create pad feels like an unwanted revival of the old USB Intuos digitizers which most of us would rather write and draw directly on the screen and it's great that we can these days. And you can do that here, but you can't rest your hand on the screen when you do it and there's no variable line width. The Yoga Book is extremely portable given its small 10.1 inch footprint too. I mean, it's like carrying literally a book around. It's so easy. It's lightweight. It's slim. It's a take-anywhere product.