 When you think about a tablet, chances are you're thinking of one of two things. Maybe something like the iPad, or something like Microsoft Surface, which is virtually a full PC. Well Lenovo thinks it has something different. It's the new Yoga Book. It's a super thin device that features both a full touchscreen on one side, and a touch sensitive panel on the other. You can type on this, you can write on it, you can even use real ink to take notes. Lenovo says it's been working on this for two or three years now, and the story of how it came to be is almost as interesting as the device itself. We want to hold true to this idea of a book. The book. We call the product the book from day one. I joke around a lot, because when you say book, it conjures up an array of different ideas. So, you know, a book that resonates with me is my favorite Dr. Seuss book, Cat in the Hat. That's the one that really mimics most closely the dimensionality of this product. So we played around and said, when we say book, a Seuss book is always the one that kind of comes to mind. The most unique part of the Yoga Book is its touch sensitive side that's opposite the 10 inch full color display. It can switch between a full QWERTY keyboard, complete with haptic feedback, and a writing surface that uses Wacom technology and the Yoga Book's included pen to transcribe writing or act as a drawing pad. The writing mode can even work with an actual pad of paper and ink insert in the pen. And it can capture written input when the main screen is off. It doesn't detach like many other tablet and keyboard systems, but instead you can flip it all the way around behind the main screen, similar to Lenovo's Yoga laptop line. Lenovo says it spent the most development time fine tuning the keyboard's inputs. Like the virtual keyboard that's on your phone, it has autocorrect and word suggestions and can even adjust the size of the tap areas based on your typing patterns. The company says that some people can get comfortable typing on it in as little as 40 minutes, but most will probably take a couple of hours of use before it feels natural. The other half of the Yoga Book is a fairly standard tablet with a 10.1 inch 1080p display, Intel Atom processor, 64GB of storage, 4GB of RAM, a battery that's good for up to 15 hours of use, and an 8 megapixel camera. All of that is housed in a thin metal shell that's just 9.6mm thick when closed. Now remarkably, though certain details such as the hinge changed over the course of the Yoga Book's development, the overall form factor stayed true to the original size, thickness, and vision. It's certainly a different idea. When you say tablet, you think slate form factor hasn't changed in five years, a little bit boring. Honestly, most tablets, you go to a shelf at a major retailer and there's a bunch of them and they all kind of look the same. We have certainly reinvented the idea of what a tablet is, and I don't know that I necessarily want to even characterize it as a tablet because of that. Yeah, this is the start of a form factor and a line of products that we think has a lot of legs, and we think there's certainly an opportunity right now to be a little bit more creative in the space, you know, in the tablet notebook space, combined space. Lenovo thinks that the Yoga Book will appeal to a younger demographic, someone who might be a student now or just recently got out of school. It'll be priced accordingly too, starting at just $499 when it hits shelves in September. There's going to be two versions, an Android model and a Windows 10 version, but they share the same specs and form factor. The company says that the changes it made to Android were to take advantage of the Yoga Book's unique form factor and to enhance productivity, so there's a new multi-Windows system and a taskbar. But the Windows model has the usual Windows 10 experience. So we concepted the product nearly three years ago now, so this is one that, you know, we're typically nine months on a product development cycle, so for anything to go three years is really a long time for us. You know, we had clear aspirations that we wanted to hit, the thinness, the lightness, the simplicity of the form factor, the functionality of both handwriting and typing capability, but all of the entertainment functionality that you know in a tablet. So it took us a while to get the ID right, and we spent quite a bit of time on the ID. We did a lot of testing actually just on usability around the function of the device. You know, our mobile use over the last ten years has changed a lot of our mindsets and our behaviors, so our devices should really reflect that, even the devices that we use for productivity. With the Yoga Book, Lenovo is hoping that you want to use your tablet the same way you use your phone, and that you carry it everywhere with you. But it's also hoping that you get some work done on it, like you do with your laptop. But all of this depends on whether or not the execution of the Yoga Book is as good as the idea of the Yoga Book. And when it gets released in a few weeks, we'll find out. How it came to be is almost interesting. It's the Yoga Book. It's a device that is supposed to be... Ready? Three, two...