Post by prof20 on Sept 8, 2016 20:18:04 GMT
Amazing technology....
Rewriting the tablet
How Lenovo brought a dream design to life
By Dan Seifert | Photography by Sean O'Kane
Tablets were supposed to be the future. They were supposed to get us off the desk and away from the laptop, and usher us into a touch-enabled world of productivity and entertainment. A dream of computing where our devices seamlessly blend between activities and go wherever we need them to. But the tablets we know, the iPads and Surfaces of the world, haven’t really lived up to that dream, whether it’s because doing actual work on them is harder than it should be, or because they are barely different than the PCs we’ve used for years.
Really, what we’ve always wanted is the thing that Microsoft never made: the Courier. It was the perfect vessel for our hopes: thin, light, and adaptable to whatever we needed it to do. You could touch it, you could write on it, you could fold it, just like a book. But the Courier never made it out of Microsoft’s labs, never got past the concept stages, and never fulfilled the dream it laid out. What we imagine is often better than what we get.
But now, seven years later, Lenovo is introducing a new take on the tablet computer. No, Lenovo didn’t make a Courier, but its new Yoga Book might inspire the same reactions. It’s about the size and shape of a hardcover children’s book, has two panels attached by a hinge, and can be used with your fingers or with its included pen. It even does some tricks with the pen that we’ve never seen before, like letting you write with real ink and have it all digitized. Lenovo didn’t set out to build just another tablet with the Yoga Book — it wanted to make something that was better for getting work done than what is already out there.
But in the process, it made a computer that’s both futuristic and relatable at the same time, just like the original Courier concept. I wanted to use the Yoga Book from the first time I laid eyes on it, and if you’re anything like me, you will, too. And unlike the Courier, you will actually be able to buy the Yoga Book.
Rewriting the tablet
How Lenovo brought a dream design to life
By Dan Seifert | Photography by Sean O'Kane
Tablets were supposed to be the future. They were supposed to get us off the desk and away from the laptop, and usher us into a touch-enabled world of productivity and entertainment. A dream of computing where our devices seamlessly blend between activities and go wherever we need them to. But the tablets we know, the iPads and Surfaces of the world, haven’t really lived up to that dream, whether it’s because doing actual work on them is harder than it should be, or because they are barely different than the PCs we’ve used for years.
Really, what we’ve always wanted is the thing that Microsoft never made: the Courier. It was the perfect vessel for our hopes: thin, light, and adaptable to whatever we needed it to do. You could touch it, you could write on it, you could fold it, just like a book. But the Courier never made it out of Microsoft’s labs, never got past the concept stages, and never fulfilled the dream it laid out. What we imagine is often better than what we get.
But now, seven years later, Lenovo is introducing a new take on the tablet computer. No, Lenovo didn’t make a Courier, but its new Yoga Book might inspire the same reactions. It’s about the size and shape of a hardcover children’s book, has two panels attached by a hinge, and can be used with your fingers or with its included pen. It even does some tricks with the pen that we’ve never seen before, like letting you write with real ink and have it all digitized. Lenovo didn’t set out to build just another tablet with the Yoga Book — it wanted to make something that was better for getting work done than what is already out there.
But in the process, it made a computer that’s both futuristic and relatable at the same time, just like the original Courier concept. I wanted to use the Yoga Book from the first time I laid eyes on it, and if you’re anything like me, you will, too. And unlike the Courier, you will actually be able to buy the Yoga Book.