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Microsoft’s Courier was supposed to be an electronic journal or diary, a piece of hardware purpose-built for applications like OneNote. Two screens with a hinge between them, it opened and closed like a book, supporting both touch and stylus input on both its screens. Lenovo’s new Yoga Book looks like a riff on the Courier combined with the company’s successful range of 360 degree hinge Yoga-branded laptops.

Like a Yoga machine, it’s a more or less clamshell form factor that can be opened right up to turn it into a tablet of sorts. Like Courier, it’s got book-like styling with both halves approximately the same size for a symmetrical look. And like the Courier, it’s designed for mixed touch and pen input. But it has a twist. A normal laptop has a screen and a keyboard. Courier has a screen and another screen. The Yoga Book does neither of these things; it has a conventional touch screen paired with a special touch input surface designed for a stylus, dubbed the Create Pad.

Using the Real Pen to paint. (credit: Lenovo)

Press a button and the Create Pad turns into a backlit keyboard using haptic feedback to simulate the feedback you’d get from a regular keyboard. In this mode, it has shades of Microsoft’s Touch Covers, but the Yoga Book’s concept is more versatile—the touch surface isn’t just a keyboard—and probably more comfortable, thanks to that feedback. The removal of the physical keys makes this half of the Yoga Book thinner; it also makes it into a drawing surface. Hide the virtual keys and it becomes a stylus workspace for the Yoga Book’s battery-free Real Pen, with 2,048 pressure levels and angle detection. Clip a piece of paper to the Create Pad and put some ink into the Real Pen and you can draw with, well, a real pen and real ink, while everything you do gets immediately digitized by the device.