Lenovo's sketch-ready Yoga Book ships on October 17th
The keyboard-less device bets big on its pen-to-pad interface, but is that enough to win an audience?
When we first got our hands on Lenovo's Yoga Book tablet, we found it to be more than just a Microsoft Surface imitator. The freeform touch field might make typing a bit to get used to, but it's the ease of drawing on stylus or pen that makes it unique. As pre-orders open today for all models to ship out on October 17th, it remains unclear whether the novelty will be enough for the device to distinguish itself in a tanking tablet market.
The Yoga Book certainly has things going for it: At $500/£430 for its Android version and $550/£510 for Windows, it's cheaper than the baseline iPad Pro and the Surface 3. Having a scribing tablet directly integrated will likely appeal to an artistic demographic more comfortable drawing on a Wacom-style pad than directly on the screen with an Apple Pencil. It even records your stylus sketches when the tablet is asleep, which should boost battery life at the expense of, well, not seeing what you're writing or drawing.
But at the end of the day, the Yoga Book doesn't have a keyboard. Despite haptic feedback in the pad and autocorrect in the Android version, our reviewer struggled to type accurately, and doubted Lenovo's claim that it would take about two hours to adapt. If a user's work depends on quickly and accurately getting words on a page, this might not be the tablet for them. Lenovo is betting big that the physical process of pen-to-pad has secretly been what many tablet users have secretly been missing. We'll see whether it's enough to carve market share away from Apple and Microsoft.
