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The Lenovo Yoga Book has a touch-based keyboard that learns your typing style

By Koh Wanzi - on 1 Sep 2016, 2:30am

The Lenovo Yoga Book has a touch-based keyboard that learns your typing style

 Lenovo Yoga Book

Innovation has been one of the key focuses of Lenovo’s strategy in recent months, and this actually means something more than just thinner and lighter designs. The company today announced the Yoga Book, a 10.1-inch 2-in-1 notebook that is probably one of the first of its kind on the market.

The star feature on the Yoga Book actually takes the form of a glaring absence. In the place where you'd expect to find the physical keyboard, you're instead greeted by a smooth, blank slate. But when you need to type, an illuminated touch-based keyboard comes to life.

This keyboard provides haptic feedback for a more tactile experience, but it also leverages artificial learning technologies to adapt to your typing style. This is analogous to how predictive text input on your smartphone works, and could help ease some teething pains when switching from a physical keyboard.

The Yoga Book can be laid completely flat or folded over to be used as a tablet. (Image Source: Lenovo)

But while most of us probably still prefer an actual keyboard at this point in time, Lenovo points out that consumers also made a similar sacrifice when giving up their Blackberries for smartphones with screen-based keyboards. It has a point there, but we'd also argue that PC keyboards are more entrenched than Blackberries ever were.

Having said that, there's still plenty to appreciate about the Yoga Book, if only as a feat of engineering. Thanks in part to its aluminum and magnesium body, it is only 4.05mm thick at its slimmest edge and weighs just 690g, making it one of the most portable convertibles out there.

The bundled stylus, or real-pen as Lenovo calls it, uses passive EMR technology, and boasts up to 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity. It's not your average stylus however, and can write in real ink as well. The typing area doubles as a notepad – placing a notebook here and writing on it with the stylus will automatically digitize and save your notes to the Yoga Book.

The keyboard doubles as a digital notepad. (Image Source: Lenovo)

However, the Yoga Book's sheer portability does mean that you won't be getting flagship-level hardware. It is powered by a modest Intel Atom x5-Z8550 SoC (1.44GHz, 2MB cache), 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and 64GB of flash storage. There’s no ultra-high resolution display either, and the Yoga Book features a modest 1,920 x 1,200-pixel IPS panel.

Both Android and Windows versions of the Yoga Book will start at S$849 locally. The Android model is slated to be available this month, with the Windows model arriving later in December.

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