Two years ago, when Lenovo first unveiled the futuristic Yoga Book[1], the company held it up alongside a hardcover Dr. Seuss book to demonstrate how thin and light it was. It had a “Halo” keyboard: a bottom half that lit up to create a digital keyboard. You could write directly on this keyless keyboard, too, as though it was a notepad.
It was a whole lot of new tech packed into a tiny, $500, fold-over tablet, but not all of that tech was fully-baked. The flat, matte keyboard came with a steep learning curve. The tablet was underpowered, especially the Windows version (yes, Lenovo shipped both an Android and a Windows version of the 2016 Yoga Book).
Now, Lenovo is back at it again with the new Yoga Book C930, unveiled at the IFA trade show in Berlin this week. It has an improved keyboard. It has a better processor. It uses E-Ink[2]! It’s also $1,000.
In refining what the Yoga Book is, and who is should be for, Lenovo has narrowed its potential customer set down to those who have enough disposable income to afford a Yoga Book as a secondary computer, or as a travel device. It’s hard to fathom millions of people buying this. At the same time, Lenovo—which has managed to expand its image beyond that of a strictly-enterprise laptop maker over the past several years—deserves credit for experimenting once again.
Lenovo says the Windows version of the 2016 Yoga Book sold much better than the Android version did; as a result, this new Yoga Book (with the forgettable name C930) will ship only as a Windows 10 device. In some ways this means it’s really more of a laptop than...