Lenovo Yoga Book 9i Review

Let's agree on one thing first: On-screen virtual keyboards suck eggs and are tools of the devil. That said, the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i ($2,000) is a thrilling variation on the convertible laptop theme: a 2-in-1 that, instead of a keyboard, has a second 13.3-inch screen below the first. You can use the second display as a virtual keyboard or partly cover it with a provided Bluetooth keyboard to work in laptop mode, or prop the device in either portrait or landscape mode for dual-screen productivity with the keyboard in front of it on your desk. Bundled with the keyboard, a folio stand, a pen, and a mouse, the Yoga Book 9i (not to be confused with Lenovo's 14-inch conventional convertible, the Yoga 9i) won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it earns an Editors' Choice award for 2-in-1 innovation—though it's really more of a 4-in-1 or a 5-in-1.

Seeing Double: The Twin-Screen Design

Dual-screen designs aren't new. Asus' ZenBook Duo 14 and ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 put a tilted, smaller second display between the keyboard and main panel. And both Asus (the Zenbook 17 Fold OLED) and Lenovo (the 13.3-inch ThinkPad X1 Fold from 2020, and a 16.3-inch successor coming soon) have offered tablets that fold in half like the fanciest smartphones. But the two halves of the Yoga Book 9i are separate, identical 13.3-inch OLED touch screens with 2,880-by-1,800-pixel resolution apiece and a soundbar hinge between them.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The sole configuration, $2,000 at Lenovo.com (a penny less at Best Buy), puts the twin panels in an attractive anodized aluminum package, a shade of blue dubbed Tidal Teal with glossy rounded edges. It features an Intel Core i7-1355U processor (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads), 16GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and Windows 11 Home. You can upgrade to Windows 11 Pro for $50, or 1TB of storage for $100.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Closed, the Yoga Book measures 0.63 by 11.8 by 8 inches and lands right on the ultraportable line at 2.95 pounds without its stand or accessories. With two screens it arguably has less need for an HDMI external monitor port, but is still short on ports with only three USB4 Type-C Thunderbolt 4 connectors—one on the left edge, two on the right—and no USB-A or Ethernet connectors or flash-card slot or even a headphone jack.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The right edge also holds the power button and a tiny sliding switch to toggle the 5-megapixel webcam. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth are standard; mobile broadband is not available. The AC power plug has a USB-C connector.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

A Laptop With a Learning Curve 

If you can get by with a single screen, the Yoga Book can work like one of Lenovo's other flip-and-fold Yoga convertibles—once it's opened, you can fold the top back into an A-frame or tent mode with one screen facing you, a kiosk or presentation mode with one screen face down, or a tablet mode with the two displays back to back. But the company has plenty of more affordable Yogas for that. You'll want to use both screens at once, though learning the different ways to do so and how to move and arrange application windows takes some practice.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Start with laptop mode. When opened and switched on, the machine shows the Windows desktop on both screens, but tap eight fingers on the lower (face-up) display and it turns into a virtual keyboard including touchpad with two mouse buttons (a three-finger tap opens a resizable touchpad by itself).

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Typing on a sheet of glass is never going to match a real keyboard, but the virtual layout sucks fewer eggs than most—it's large enough for brief stints of typing (at a walk or jog, not a running pace) and offers a top row of system-shortcut keys as well as adjustable opacity, three levels of haptic vibration or feedback, and optional keystroke sound (more of a pop than a click). 

For serious typing, place the 4.5-by-11.6-inch Bluetooth keyboard on the lower screen—it snaps magnetically into place. Align the keyboard with the top edge, and the bottom half of the lower screen shows the virtual touchpad. Align it with the bottom edge, and the top half of the lower screen shows your Outlook calendar and an MSN news feed (what Lenovo calls the Widget Bar, also visible by pulling the virtual keyboard down to hide the touchpad). Pro tip: Don't forget to remove the keyboard before closing the laptop, or you'll break the screen or hinge. 

(Credit: Eric Grevstad)

Want to use both screens? Now you're talking. You can open the Yoga Book 9i flat like a magazine in your lap or on your desk, using the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse or scribbling with the pen in Lenovo's Smart Note app (which can export notes in PDF or PNG format or to Microsoft OneNote).

(Credit: Molly Flores)

As you'd expect, you can drag, resize, and arrange app windows on the two screens as you like. Drag the top of a window, and a small pop-up offers to move it to the other display or add it to a two-, three-, or four-app layout. Tap inside a window with five fingers (actually not as easy as tapping with three or eight), and it expands or waterfalls across both screens.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

In perhaps the Yoga Book's neatest trick, the travel cover that wraps around the keyboard origami-folds into a sort of pyramid that props up the dual screens in either portrait or landscape mode, with a ridge or bump to secure the bottom edge. You can snap the keyboard into place below the ridge or detach and move it closer to you, also using the supplied wireless mouse and stylus pen as the spirit moves you. 

(Credit: John Burek)

Portrait mode is like, well, propping an open book in front of you. (Lenovo says a dual-screen e-reader app is coming soon.) Landscape mode is a bit weirder, with the top screen craning like a praying mantis above the bottom. Either way, the soundbar across the middle prevents a seamless big-screen view, but it quickly becomes a nifty way to work, and far slicker than carrying a laptop or tablet plus keyboard and a portable monitor. 

(Credit: Eric Grevstad)

Downright Dazzling, But a Few Nits to Pick 

There's no fingerprint reader, but the webcam offers IR face recognition for Windows Hello and can log you in and lock the system when you approach and depart respectively. It also boasts extra-sharp resolution, up to 2,560 by 1,440 pixels for 16:9 or 2,592 by 1,944 for 4:3 images or videos. Its images looked a little softer than I expected but were well-lit and colorful without noise or static. 

I've already passed judgment on the virtual keyboard. The real keyboard is considerably more comfortable, though short of desktop or even laptop class—it has a snappy but extremely shallow typing feel. My frequent gripes about cursor arrow keys arranged in a clumsy row instead of an inverted T, and the arrows doubling with the Fn key in lieu of real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, are unavoidable with a small portable keyboard like this. 

(Credit: Eric Grevstad)

The keyboard does earn points for the same top-row system shortcuts as its virtual cousin, including brightness, volume, microphone mute, and F12 to launch the User Center software that's half tutorial and half control panel, governing and offering myriad suggestions for using the dual screens. It also recharges when plugged into a USB-C port, while the bundled mouse and pen use a single AA and a button battery respectively. 

(Credit: John Burek)

Lenovo's mouse is small and plain, with a clickable scroll wheel and a top button for cycling through 800dpi, 1,600dpi, and 2,400dpi resolution. Like the keyboard, it can use either of two Bluetooth channels. The 5.5-inch pen has two programmable buttons; it's pressure- and tilt-sensitive and kept up with my fastest swoops and scribbles with good palm rejection.

(Credit: Eric Grevstad)

The soundbar hinge carries Bowers & Wilkins branding and holds two 2-watt tweets, with a pair of 2-watt woofers in the corners of the base. The Lenovo pumps out impressive sound, quite loud (though a bit boomy at high volume) with better-than-average bass and clear highs and midtones. Audio isn't harsh or tinny, and it's easy to make out overlapping tracks. Dolby Access software offers music, movie, game, dynamic, and voice presets and an equalizer. 

Having two 13.3-inch OLED screens is an embarrassment of riches. The Yoga Book's are gorgeous, razor-sharp with richly saturated colors that pop like poster paints. Contrast is colossal, as with most OLED panels, and white backgrounds are clean and pure, while black areas are India ink. Viewing angles are broad, though the touch glass shows some reflections, and fine details crystal-clear. The only possible complaint is that while brightness seems more than ample, some of the credit goes to OLED's high contrast; the screens aren't really bright enough to see in outdoor sunlight.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Actually, I have one other complaint, which a Lenovo rep says is an unfortunate side effect of using the virtual touchpad with Windows 11: When the display is redrawn (due to a dialog box popping up, say), the mouse pointer or cursor frequently disappears or hides under the Bluetooth keyboard. Getting it back is as simple as tapping the screen, but it's quite frustrating. The virtual touchpad works better than the virtual keyboard, but the vanishing cursor had me using the mouse more than I thought I would. 

Besides Smart Note, Dolby Access, and a McAfee LiveSafe trial that besieges you with bothersome pop-ups, Lenovo preloads the Yoga Book with Lenovo Vantage, which consolidates system updates, Wi-Fi security, a variety of option settings, and ads for $29.99 annual Smart Performance optimization and $49.99 annual Smart Lock security and theft recovery services.

Testing the Yoga Book 9i: Two Screens, No Waiting 

With no dual-screen competitors to put the Yoga Book 9i against, we filled out our benchmark charts with four rival 2-in-1's in the same screen size class. Only one, the 13.3-inch Asus Zenbook S 13 Flip OLED, is a Yoga-style folding convertible; the HP Dragonfly Folio G3 has a pull-forward design with a 13.5-inch, 3:2 aspect ratio display. Two other contenders are detachables rather than convertibles, though the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 comes with its keyboard and stylus while the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 tablet charges extra for them.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while HandBrake 1.4 is an open-source video transcoder we use to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Primate Labs' Geekbench simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. 

Finally, we test systems' content-creation chops with workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, an automated extension to Adobe's Creative Cloud image editor that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated tasks ranging from opening, rotating, and resizing an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Lenovo led the way in PCMark 10, though all five systems cleared the 4,000-point hurdle that shows excellent productivity for everyday fare like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. With the only 13th Generation Intel chip in the group, it did fine but didn't dominate in the CPU tests. Its speed and splendid screens make it a great choice for Photoshop or other creative apps. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The Yoga Book was narrowly the quickest in a generally slow group. Productivity portables with integrated graphics will never come near the frame rates of gaming laptops with discrete GPUs, so stick to Solitaire and media streaming, and forget about fast-twitch shoot-'em-ups.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

It's predictable but still regrettable—having two screens is bad for battery life. The Lenovo lasted a respectable eight hours in our video rundown, so it should get you through a workday, but it beat only the Dell. (I tried twice to run the test with the lower screen dimmed to zero, but it mysteriously relit both times.) 

In happier news, the Yoga Book joined the Zenbook in flaunting the fabulous color reproduction of OLED display tech, posting perfect coverage of all three popular gamuts. And while it fell short of the 400 nits of brightness that Lenovo lists (and that we like to see from IPS screens), OLED's sky-high contrast means it's more than bright enough to delight the eye.

(Credit: Eric Grevstad)

Verdict: A Landmark Laptop (Though Not a Cheap One!)

Two grand is pricey for an ultraportable, but the Yoga Book 9i is no mere ultraportable (perhaps why it sold out at Lenovo.com during our work on this review). Once you learn its myriad ways to work—and perhaps adjust your workstyle to rely on the real keyboard and mouse more often than the virtual inputs—it's a fantastic alternative to carrying a laptop plus an external second screen. Dual-screen designs have been tried before. Finally one has succeeded, and that's easily worth Editors' Choice recognition.