Lenovo Just Revived The Spirit Of Microsoft's Legendary Lost Tablet

Today Lenovo unveiled the book Yoga: A new hybrid tablet / notebook, offering both Android and Windows 10 flavors squarely focused on helping users to be productive.

Like most tablets manufactured in the past two years, the Yoga book takes its cues from Microsoft.

Unlike most of these tablets, the Yoga of the book seems to be inspired not by the Microsoft Surface, which even imitated Apple with its iPad Pro but the Courier Microsoft, a long-awaited tablet leaked first to the press 2008 and killed on orders from Bill Gates in 2010, before it was even officially announced.

The Courier PC was a "little book" dual screen. Instead of a keyboard, which wore two touch screens 7 inches, connected by a hinge. With these two screens, it could be used as a kind of called "infinite journal," drawing or taking notes with a pen in one hand while reading the news or make an appointment to another.

Meet the Lenovo Yoga book, announced Wednesday, and shipping in the US in late October. 

 The Lenovo Yoga Book

He is accused of Lenovo as a super-thin, super lightweight tablet. You may have noticed that does not have a keyboard, in the traditional sense. Instead, there is a kind of funky touch screen, called the "Halo keyboard" for Lenovo, which is essentially recreate the feeling of writing with a normal laptop keyboard without actually one.

The keyboard also gives halo Yoga gives the best and most characteristic Courier-esque:

Halo keyboard pulls double duty as a sketchbook, with its wide open hinge orderly. If you drop a piece of paper on top of the keyboard, and use the stylus included in the book Yoga in the way pen (seriously, it happens), the notes you take will be scanned and instantly put on the main screen. He did the same, without paper and pencil in its normal mode, but, hey, it's less fun.

Anyway, as you can see, the spirit of the Microsoft Courier lives in the book of Yoga. The second screen is not quite the concept of full touchscreen committed by mail (The Verge reports that Lenovo has tried, but the second screen also degrades battery life), but the core of a sketchbook dedicated clearly suffered.

There is a case to do so despite the hype, the Post Office was a bit of a scientific project that deserves to be killed. But times have changed since 2010, and perhaps the time has come for a pen tablet driven after all these years.

yoga book will be available late October from $ 499 for the Android version and $ 550 for the model of Windows 10. And while it remains to be seen if Lenovo bet on a genre shifted the tablet will bear fruit, it is very nice to see a company finally think a little differently.