Lenovo Yoga Book 9i review: Seeing double
The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i's dual display is undoubtedly innovative, but for its price, who is it aimed at?
Whichever way you look at it, the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i is weird. It's a weird laptop. Think it's more of a tablet? It's a weird tablet too.
The Yoga Book 9i is a bit like a gigantic Microsoft Surface Duo. It's a dual-screen oyster - a hybrid of a kind you may well have never seen before.
It's way more than just a quirky experiment. This is a full-on Windows PC with remarkably good battery life that, in certain situations, basically feels like a dual-screen desktop setup. However, its appeal is narrowed too often by the potential awkwardness and the sheer cost of the Yoga Book 9i.
It costs $2,000/£2,299, and that is both the version you’ll see sold online most commonly, and the one on review here too. Is it for you? Keep reading to help you decide.
Lenovo’s Book series continues to offer novel designs you don’t tend to see everywhere, like this portable dual-monitor PC. However, using it like a laptop highlights some frustrating issues and it doesn’t quite have the pep to replace a desktop for the more power-hungry crowd.
"What even is this thing" is a valid reaction to the Yoga Book 9i. This family has been around for years, and never fails to provide some of computing's most eye-catching designs.
However, the concept remains the same: what if, instead of the classic keyboard part of a laptop, we use another screen instead?
From the outside, the Yoga Book 9i looks like any old stylish hybrid laptop. But front-on, it's all change. To type laptop-style, you need to either use the virtual keyboard or place the separate wireless keyboard on the lower screen.
There are magnets to hold it in place. And while these aren't strong enough to keep it there if you start flinging it around, the keyboard does feel secure while typing. Waggling it about on its magnetic moorings even has some of the character of a corporate stress toy. The mechanism works, it's just not literally idiot-proof.
Place it at the top of the lower screen and the area below becomes a touchpad. Push it down low, towards the bottom, and the upper screen area becomes a space for little widgety apps like your calendar.
Alternatively, the Yoga Book 9i keyboard can be used completely detached, as it's wireless. This is how you might choose to use it at home - and this is also where the use cases get a bit more interesting.
For example, you might flip the lower part around on its 360-degree hinge to let the screen stand up by itself. An included folio case will hold one screen above the other, which is where you get closest to an actual portable dual-monitor array. It looks precarious, but is actually quite stable.
Alternatively, it can stand up straight with the two displays in portrait, to be used like some sort of Microsoft Excel-lover's dual monitor dream machine.
Obviously, there is more faff involved here than with with a normal laptop. You can't close the hinge with the keyboard in place. And the keyboard has to be charged every now and then over USB-C. There's no wireless charging here.
The virtual touchpad will regularly fail to appear too, making you either re-seat the keyboard or, on occasion, have to faff about in even more annoying ways.
Yes, it works eventually. But there's a significant downside to working like this - and that's a lack of straightforward simplicity. However, if the dual-screen applications are really getting your tech nerd motor going, you’ll probably find the Yoga Book 9i's form factor quite appealing.
The question then becomes: are the two displays worth it? These are 13.3-inch OLED screens of 1800p resolution. They'd be top-tier stuff in a normal laptop, but we get two of them here.
Initially we thought they might be different panels, but that's only because you lose a wee bit of brightness when looking from an angle. They are actually very similar.
As is typical of an OLED, contrast is ultra-deep thanks to the emissive pixels, resulting in a rich-looking and punchy picture. 1800p resolution across 13.3 inches also leads to great sharpness from normal distances, and I've got no complaints here.
Brightness is ok too, at 366 nits, but for outside working I did find I needed to totally max out the brightness to make the Yoga Book 9i remotely usable. It has a glossy glass touchscreen - no surprise there - and also no friend to sunny days. Colour is probably the star of the show here. It combines exceptional depth and accuracy.
An Intel app called Intel Graphics Command Center lets you tweak the colour balance and saturation too, although we'd ideally like to have some easier default profiles. Still, there's a good chance you've never seen the Netflix logo look as red as it does on the Yoga Book 9i - on a laptop at least.
Both screens support stylus input, and you get a third-generation Lenovo pen bundled in the box. It has a 4,096 pressure sensitivity level stylus, easily good enough for some pretty serious digital art and graphic design jobs.
Overall the dual screens of the Yoga Book 9i provide real versatility, stopping just short of the portable big-screen dream of the true foldable display laptop, a la Asus ZenBook Fold.
So how does working on the Yoga Book 9i actually feel? It's a mixed bag. Using the virtual keyboard is going to feel like pure hell if you're not accustomed to it. Our take? Don't bother trying.
Using the actual keyboard accessory feels miles better, and honestly it's not too different from using a "real" laptop keyboard. It's stiff enough on its own despite being all-plastic, but when it's laid on the screen there's a rigid panel underneath it anyway.
The keys are a mite shallow and light by Lenovo standards, but the general typing experience is at least on-par with something like the Microsoft Surface Pro. However, there's no backlight, which seems a major oversight given how expensive this laptop costs, and that it already has an integrated battery.
The touchpad? That's a different story. There is no dedicated touchpad here, just the lower touchscreen's glass. You'd think this would be ideal, but it is not.
Normal touchpads use textured glass for a reason, because it reduces friction for a smoother finger glide. The Yoga Book 9i's surface is too resistive, too glossy, and feels plain wrong as virtual touchpad.
With a touchpad, you're not dealing with 1:1 control as you are on a touchscreen, which means you have to have greater freedom to made small, or large, glide motions.
It also doesn't have a proper clicker like a touchpad. There is a little bit of vibration motor feedback when you press, but I simply don't feel anywhere near as confident using the Yoga Book 9i's virtual touchpad as I do the real deal. I ended up using the upper touchscreen way more than we usually would with a laptop. If you want to use the Yoga Book 9i as your everyday laptop, I would strongly suggest getting hold of a wireless mouse for the best experience.
The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i has full laptop PC-like specs, but Lenovo sensibly uses some of Intel's most powerful frugal processors.
The Yogak Book 9i tested here has an Intel Core i7-1355U CPU, 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. The bit to take notice of the most is the "U" at the end of the CPU name. This means it's part of Intel's ultra-low voltage range.
These provide enough power for everyday jobs - more than enough - but are not ideal for video editors and other hardware-melting tasks. In this generation you can also step up to the next tier, called "P" series CPUs in this generation, without ending up with a chunky or heavy laptop.
Just need your laptop to do light stuff and normal work? It'll breeze on through.
This is not, unlike the MacBook Air, a fanless design, though. Lenovo has managed to cram a full cooling fan into the base section, which holds all of the key internals. It is never too noisy and, much to our surprise, not too distracting either. With slim laptops fans can sometimes sound like a rather loud mosquito flying around the place. Not so here. Nice work, Lenovo.
Contrary to what you might guess, it's not a total write-off for gaming either. The Yoga Book 9i's Intel processor has an Intel Xe GPU, which in the right laptop can provide results similar to a Steam Deck. Here? Not quite, but we aren’t a million miles away either.
So will it handle Cyberpunk 2077? Yup, just about. Sure you need to bring the resolution right down, cut down settings to their absolute minimums and rely heavily on FSR scaling. And even then you're looking at around 30fps in the best instance.
However, it is possible, playable and still looks good. Just make sure you head into the Lenovo Vantage app and switch from the Intelligent Cooling mode to Extreme Performance. This unlocks around 22 per cent additional power, and you'll need every drop of it when gaming.
This mode also increases noise generated by the fans a bit, but they remain resolutely non-irritating - another string to the Yoga Book 9i's bow.
One other benefit of using a low-voltage processor is they are easier on the juice. You might expect the dual screens to mess that up, but they don't in a more laptop-like orientation.
WIth the keyboard attached, so the lower display is only left showing the touchpad buttons, the Yoga Book 9i can last up to 10 hours 20 minutes. Not bad, right?
That's at a fairly normal indoors brightness level. When used outdoors with the screen brightness maxed out it will last up to eight hours when doing simple tasks like word processing on a single screen. It lost 25 per cent battery in two hours.
The Yoga Book 9i also excels at other light stuff like playing music and movies, because of its pretty riotous Bowers & Wilkins speakers. They sit in a bar between the two screens , and can pump out serious volume and a good serving of bass for what is still a super-space-limited design. Lovely stuff.
Connections are limited to three USB-Cs. The power button may look like a SIM slot, but it isn't. However, all three of the USBs are high-bandwidth Thunderbolt connectors, meaning with the help of a dock or USB hub you can connect a whole lot of stuff to this thing without it choking. But where the hell is the headphone jack Lenovo? There's clearly room for one.
The Yoga Book 9i also has an above average webcam, one with a 5MP sensor that you can think of as the next step beyond today's 1080p laptop webcams. It's a cut above the norm and will serve you perfectly well for video calls.
The Yoga Book 9i is a laptop strange enough that the core question here is not "is it any good?" but "why the hell do you want it?"
This isn't the niche foldable dream of a laptop-sized thing can can turn into a desktop-sized PC, because the two displays are very much separate here. Love the idea of a dual portrait monitor setup you can carry around with you, or like having one widescreen display sitting above the other? Awesome, the Yoga Book 9i is for you.
For the rest of us, the Yoga Book 9i's awkwardness when used as a plain old laptop casts a shadow over the bold design, especially given how pricey this thing is. Still, there are plenty of highlights: great speakers, bold OLED displays, long battery life and a highly usable wireless keyboard - but exactly who'll enjoy them, and under what circumstances? The jury is still out.
Technology writer. Stuff, WIRED, TrustedReviews, TechRadar, T3, Wareable and others
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