Lenovo’s New Yoga Book Is Astoundingly Innovative, Yet Outclassed By Apple’s MacBook and iPad Pro

Lenovo has debuted their latest creation: the Yoga Book. And the hybrid device might just be a step toward the blurred future of notebooks and tablets.

It’s hard to classify exactly what the Yoga Book is. It’s kind of a laptop, it’s kind of a tablet, but at its core, it’s really something else entirely. The half of the device (where the capacitive touch keyboard usually resides) can turn into a drawing pad with a simple button press. Lay a piece of paper on top of that half, and you can take physical notes with a real pen that will be digitally recorded as well, Wired reported.

The Yoga Book is lightweight, too. It clocks in at just around 1.5 pounds — around the same weight as an iPad Pro with a smart keyboard. It’s available in both an Android and a Windows 10 model, and both versions are outfitted with 4-gigabytes of RAM. Like Lenovo’s other Yoga-series devices, the Yoga Book can be used in laptop configuration, “tent mode” for movie viewing, or spun all the way around for a tablet configuration.

But as much as the Yoga Book pushes the boundaries and blurs the line between laptop and tablet, it still has its downfalls. As a concept, the Yoga Book is incredibly innovative and is probably pretty indicative of the future of laptops and tablets. As a practical workstation, though, it has its faults.

As a pure tablet, the Yoga Book can manage, but probably can’t compete with the latest and greatest from manufacturers such as Samsung or Apple. The Yoga Book ships running Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which isn’t really suited for a device of this size. And it’s just not as powerful as something like the iPad Pro series.

And as a laptop, the device suffers in a few categories as well. The Android OS definitely isn’t made for laptops, and it shows. And the Windows 10 version, as mentioned before, only has 4-gigabytes of RAM. While that’s fine for an Android-based device, it’s barely sufficient for something running Windows. According to The Verge, the Yoga Book takes a while to boot up, and apps were prone to stutter or freeze during regular use.

And that’s not even taking the Halo keyboard into consideration. The majority of reviewers have described it as clunky, and difficult to get used to. The keyboard ditches physical keys for a haptic touch surface. And while that allows the device to be thinner and more versatile, the Yoga Book suffers while typing. Wired compared it to learning how to type on a touchscreen phone for the first time: your writing will be riddled with typos and errors. Gizmodo added that the layout of the Halo keyboard is “truly awful.”

So yes, while the Yoga Book is a very cool concept and design, when compared against a pure tablet like an iPad Pro, or a pure laptop like a MacBook Pro, it’s just not in the same class.

If you’re an early adopter, and you want the latest, innovative tech at the expense of practicality, you might think about picking up a Yoga Book. But if you’re the pragmatic type, and you’re looking for a laptop or tablet that just works, you might want to look into an iPad Pro, or just wait a little while longer for Apple to roll out its refreshed MacBook lineup.