Do you recall the Yoga Book that was announced back at IFA in 2016? It was the star of the show back then, and it made waves again when Lenovo announced its predecessor at IFA 2018 a few months ago. The revamped Yoga Book C930 features a better display, it offers much faster performance and a significantly improved typing experience.
Lenovo always does a great job of listening to users feedback, so it’s no surprise that the latest Yoga Book addresses so much of the gripes users had with its predecessor. To start, Lenovo has dumped the laggy laser etched virtual keyboard from the original Yoga Book and replaced it with a swanky e-ink keyboard.
This new keyboard takes a bit of adjustment, but its haptic feedback makes the typing experience feel quite satisfying and you’ll be able to speed type on it in no time at all. That said, it’s simply not as satisfying as a physical keyboard, but that is to be expected. Our biggest gripe with its new e-ink keyboard is that the mouse trackpad area is pretty small and that it flows right into the keyboard. As a result, we often found that our fingers would accidentally drift onto the space bar wreaking havoc.
But the e-ink display on the Yoga Book doesn’t just function as a keyboard, it also doubles as a drawing pad and an e-book reader. Unfortunately, the latter function is limited because currently, it lacks support for any ebook formats including Kindle ebooks. Fortunately, Lenovo says that support for ePub and Mobi ebooks are on its way. But we’d really like to see Kindle support too.
A Lenovo Active pen is included with the Yoga Book for sketching and taking notes. You can use the Pen on the 10.8” touchscreen display as well as on the e-ink display in Note mode. It’s really neat being able to use the pen on both displays, but when you’re drawing on the e-ink display there is lag. Ultimately it isn’t really more useful to use the pen on the e-ink display than it is to use it directly on the main touchscreen display.
The pen is able to attach to the back of the display lid thanks to a convenient magnet. You can conserve power by using the e-ink display in “tablet mode” with the hinge flipped back and the main display turned off.
Speaking of the 10.8” QHD touchscreen display on the Yoga Book, it is a significant improvement over its predecessor. It’s a lot brighter and sharper with more vibrant colors. It’s the perfect display for this form-factor and we have no complaints about it.
Measuring just 0.39” thick when closed, the Yoga Book C930 is incredibly thin. Unfortunately, its lid doesn’t feature a lip, which means it can be somewhat difficult to peel its lid away from its base. Fortunately, Lenovo has come up with an intuitive way to separate its lid from its base. With the “knock to open” you simply have to knock twice on the lid and the lid pops up. We can see this feature eventually becoming ubiquitous in all of Lenovo’s laptops. Unfortunately, with the Yoga Book C930 we found that this feature doesn’t work half of the time.
Thanks to an upgrade to 7th generation Intel Core I processors, performance is solid and a whole lot better than the previous generation Yoga Book too. You’ll have no trouble with data to day tasks, but it’s not quite a workhorse.
Bottom Line
There’s still plenty of room for improvement with the Yoga Book C930, but that hasn’t stopped us from enjoying using it. We really appreciate the versatile form factor that the C930 offers, and that it’s so extremely thin and light (1.71 lbs) that you can carry it in your bag all day without having it weigh you down. It’s also just as suitable for long flights as it is for laying in bed watching movies.
Ultimately, the Yoga Book C930 is not a solution for someone looking for an everyday workhorse laptop. However, it is a fun, futuristic, and extremely travel-friendly 2-in-1 for those who can afford it. The Yoga Book C930 will certainly wow and impress your friends. It’s also a refreshing product in a world full of lookalike laptops and 2-in-1’s. We certainly hope that Lenovo continues to work on developing this series.
Pricing for the Yoga Book C930 begins at $949 at Best Buy.
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