Lenovo Yoga Book Wants You To Ditch Your Standard Keyboard

With tablets now a ubiquitous product, Lenovo is looking to further change the relationship between touch and type with its new Yoga Book, a laptop/tablet hybrid that combines the flat surface space of a tablet, with the touch responsive keyboard of a standard clamshell notebook. Except the keyboard isn’t really there at all.

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The Yoga book consists of a 1.5 pound, 10.1-inch full HD IPS display mounted on a 360-degree hinge. Attached to the opposite side of the hinge is a flat, matte touch surface. Like many hybrid tablet devices out now, the hinge allows for four distinct modes: browsing, with just the touchscreen, viewing, using the flat surface to prop up the screen, create, which when flattened onto a table turns the entire device into a drawing pad, and type, where you takes notes like you would on a standard laptop. With the tap of a button, Lenovo’s Halo Keyboard appears on the flat surface, a glowing outline of a regular-sized QWERTY keyboard. Completely touch activated, the keys appear when you need them, and Lenovo suggests that you can confidently type with the phantom keys after just two hours. A recent Engadget review suggests that the halo keys ultimately do not make for a fast and effective note-taking experience. In conjunction with the Wacom-like sketching surface and pen stylus, the Lenovo Yoga Book does have so outstanding features. The pen stylus allows you to draw on the keyboard surface even while the tablet is asleep, and there is feature that allows the pen to be used on real paper while saving to the device in real time.

The Yoga Book runs on Android or Windows, and offers standard performance and battery. Feel free to multitask as you normally would, although the device lacks the full power of the Surface 4. Lenovo markets the lightweight hybrid as “productivity-on-the-go,” but that might not yet be the case. The Lenovo Yoga Book is still somewhat a novelty, but makes for a interesting combo product for artists and note-takers alike.