Lenovo is revamping convertible tablet keyboards with its upcoming Yoga Book.
Laptops and 2-in-1 these days are fairly straightforward. On one half is the display while the other houses the input devices such as the physical keyboard and track pad. With Lenovo's Yoga Book, however, the latter half seems to be non-existent, at least at first glance.
Lenovo chose to do away with the physical keys and opted instead for a virtual backlit keyboard on top of a full-sized touch-sensitive panel. Similar to smartphones' virtual keyboards, Lenovo's full-sized virtual QWERTY keyboard offers predictive input and auto-correct. Adjusting the type area to fit specific typing patterns is also possible.
The company claims that some people have gotten used to using the virtual keyboard in just 40 minutes. Some reckon that an average of two hours is needed before anyone can fully adapt to typing without the physical keys.
While typing on a virtual keyboard may take a while for one to get used to and may prove to be an inconvenient experience for a time, it does not come without its perks. An obvious one with this new keyboard iteration is that the user will not feel any protruding keys when the device gets transformed to full tablet mode, which is a standard feature for the Yoga line in which the keyboard is folded behind the display.
Moreover, with but a press of a button, the entire keyboard outline can disappear and the touch panel becomes the "Create Pad," which is Lenovo's fancy term for a blank canvass that users can write and draw on using the included stylus. Note that the stylus is the Wacom real pen, which functions like a stylus but doubles as a regular pen that uses ink.
"I tried placing an inch-thick notebook on top of the surface and wrote on it with the Real Pen, and I was impressed when the system still detected my scribbles," writes Cherlynn Low of Engadget.
Jeff Meredith, Lenovo general manager and vice president for the Android Chrome computing business group, thinks that the Yoga Book reinvents the idea of what a tablet is.
"When you say tablet, you think, slate form factor, hasn't changed in five years, a little bit boring," comments Meredith. "[The Yoga Book] is the start of a form factor in a line of products that we think has a lot of legs."
Lenovo will release a Windows 10 and an Android model of the Yoga Book later this October for $549 and $499, respectively. A new taskbar and multi-windows system were added to the Android version, which is currently running Android 6.0 Marshmallow, for enhanced productivity.
Both the Windows and Android models have the same dimensions and run on the same parts and technical specifications — a 10.1-inch 1,920 x 1,200 FHD IPS display, an Intel Atom x5-Z8550 processor, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM and a 64 GB internal storage capacity. The rear camera is 8 MP while the front-facing one is 2 MP.
However, the power consumption of the two models differs. The Windows version will chew through 8,500 mAh battery within 13 hours while Android can last up to 15 hours.
