Alongside the monstrous ThinkPad X1 Extreme, Lenovo’s announced a handful of new Yoga products, from a non-convertible laptop (the first Yoga of its sort) to one packing a miniature Dolby Atmos-supporting sound bar, and our new favourite ultraportable, a Yoga Book with a regular display and an E-Ink one that serves as an e-reader, keyboard and sketchpad, call the Yoga Book C930.
Not by the book
Lenovo’s tried a few iterations of the Yoga Book, including one where you can scribble on real paper pads made to fit the device and have your doodles digitised, and the very early versions that had a physical keyboard. For the latest version, Lenovo’s trying something new. One of the two 10.8in, 16:9 aspect ratio displays is a 1920×1080 e-ink one. The other, is a colour LCD display offering 400nits of brightness and resolution of 2560×1600 (2K).
The e-ink display supports PDF and all eBook formats, so folding the Yoga Book back on itself turns it into an HD e-reader. Users can also use a supplied stylus to annotate pages. Stick to using the e-ink display alone and you can expect up to 14 hours of continuous use.
What’s particularly impressive about the e-ink panel is it also serves as the touch keyboard when using the colour LCD. Haptic feedback and excellent responsiveness make for a more satisfying typing experience than you’d expect, particularly if you’re used to tapping away on a tablet computer’s display. Using it in laptop orientation drops the anticipated battery life to around 10 hours. It’s also possible to handwrite notes and have them converted to digital text as you go.
Two of the previous criticisms levelled at the Yoga Book has been resounding addressed this time around: performance and storage. The new Book will be available in Core i3 and i5 iterations, with 4GB of RAM and 256GB storage.
Finally, one of the Yoga Book’s most show-offy new attributes is the knock-to-open function. Prying apart it’s thin edges when the Book is closed can be tricky, so if it’s on a flat surface you can knock twice on the top and it’ll pop open a few millimetres to help you along.
The Yoga Book C930 will be coming to South Africa… but we don’t know when or how much it’ll cost yet. We’ll scribble you a note when we do.