 This is David with The Verge, and this is the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13, part of Lenovo's new lineup of Windows 8 machines. On the one hand, this is a fairly normal-looking laptop. It weighs 3.5 pounds. It's about two-thirds of an inch thick. It has a mix of soft touch and kind of leathery materials. It feels a little odd and not like a machine, but is well built. It has a 13.3-inch display and a fairly standard set of ports for a laptop. You get HDMI, two USB ports, and an SD card reader. So you might never know that it does anything else other than a normal laptop until you push the screen back a little and find that it'll actually rotate 360 degrees all the way around. That's why it's called Yoga. The device is super flexible, and you can use it in a bunch of different positions. You can use it like a laptop, obviously, or you can flip the screen all the way around to the back and hold it like a tablet in both hands. You can also prop it up like a teepee, which is pretty good for watching movies, or use the base as a stand and have the screen pointing outwards. The device also actually knows which orientation it's in and shifts accordingly, so it'll make apps like PowerPoint, it'll kick them straight into presentation mode when you put it into stand mode, which is pretty cool. You'll wind up using it like a laptop the vast majority of the time, but it's nice to have the other options when they're appropriate. The US 13.3-inch display is a pretty good one. It's a 1600 by 900 IPS display and has great viewing angles and color reproduction. It's also a touchscreen, but it's not a particularly good one. It occasionally registers taps as swipes and vice versa, and sometimes just doesn't register anything at all. It's not a huge problem and for the most part works fine, but it's definitely there. And unfortunately, the Yoga's trackpad doesn't really help matters either. Its surface is really smooth and it works great just as a pointer, but things like two-finger scrolling or edge gestures are really hit or miss. The keyboard, on the other hand, is great. It's a lot like Lenovo's ThinkPad keyboards with the smile design and the concave keys, and they feel great, though I don't love the extra row of keys on the right side, which kind of throws everything off-center. I wind up having to set my hands down and then shift one key to the left and then start typing before I would actually get it going. So it has some crazy features, but performance-wise, this is pretty much your average Ultrabook. It handled all my daily tasks really well, from streaming music to dozens of tabs to watching Netflix, but it's really not great for gaming or anything intensive like that. Battery life is solid. You'll get about five hours, which is pretty average for an Ultrabook, though that gets totally destroyed by basically any kind of game. Lenovo pre-loads a bunch of apps onto the Yoga, but it's a different sort of Windows bloatware than I'm used to. There aren't really any pop-ups or nagging notifications from Norton or McAfee. You just get a bunch of apps you don't really want, kind of like a phone. The Yoga starts at $999 for a model running a Core i3 processor, but the model I tested had a Core i5, along with 4GB of RAM, Intel's integrated graphics, and a 128GB SSD for 100 more than the base model. It's a really solid Ultrabook, with a good screen, a bunch of cool form factors, and no huge flaws. The touchscreen and trackpad were frustrating at points, but neither is a dealbreaker. It's definitely still clear that there are some bugs with drivers and with Windows 8 in general, and those will get ironed out over time, but if you want to buy into Windows 8 right now, this is a really solid way in.