Lenovo Yoga Book :: Two weeks in

by Volker Weber

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The Lenovo Yoga Book is a dream. It's thin, it's light, it's elegant. It would be my companion when I leave the house. But I am afraid it's not working for me.

One reason is dozens of quirks with Windows 10. Sometimes it does not turn on. Sometimes it does not turn off I assume, because the battery is depleted. When I tap on a link in Twitter, it inverts the screen before flipping back to show the page in Edge. I can't move a Window to the side in tablet mode; you do that to split the screen for two windows. When in tablet mode it always opens the onscreen keyboard first until I type a character on the Halo keyboard. The first keypress on the Halo keyboard often gets lost. The list goes on.

The more important reason is that I am not learning how to type on the flat Halo keyboard. Yes, I can look at the keyboard and type hunt & peck style. But I cannot look at my text while I type. Which is useless to me. How do I know what I am thinking if I cannot see what I am writing?

A less important reason is that I cannot draw on a digitizer pad. I can draw on the screen with Surface or iPad Pro but drawing off screen would require some training. Yes, I could use the clipboard and paper, but you cannot erase stuff on paper, while you can on screen. Awkward.

Lenovo says they don't see those Windows quirks and that there is something wrong with my particular machine. I will try again with a new one. But the other conceptual flaws remain. This does not mean this machine is useless. People who are bound to their office desk because of a digitizer finally have solution to work everywhere. And for people who want to use the machine mostly as a consumption tablet, it's the most convenient one on the market. I just would not recommend it for a writer.

While the Yoga Book does not hit the spot, the best new notebook I saw this year, was the ThinkPad X1 Yoga. I knew I could not keep it so I returned it as quickly as possible before getting too attached to it.

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