Artist Hands-On Impression of Lenovo Miix 510 and Yoga Book

Update: Detailed reviews for the Lenovo Miix 510 and Lenovo Yoga Book are now available

I was surprised when Lenovo Singapore invited me to their product launch. That was quite unexpected. But it's cool because I wanted to check out the new Lenovo Miix 510 and the Yoga Book.

And yesterday while I was at the event, I met my friends James Leong and Michael Ng. I found out that they have been testing the Yoga Book for a few weeks already. That is fantastic because they were able to give me lots of useful information regarding the Yoga Book.

So what's the difference between the Miix 510, Miix 700 and the Yoga Book?

The Miix 700 is a tablet that features an Intel m7 processor. The Miix 510 is a tablet that features up to 6th gen Intel i7 processor. The Yoga Book is a laptop with touch keyboard with no physical keys. So those are the main differences. You can think of the Miix 510 as a Surface Pro 4 competitor.

Here are the key specs for the Miix 510

• Processor: Up to 6th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 processor
• Operating System: Up to Windows 10 Home
• Graphics: Up to Intel® HD 520
• Memory: 8GB max
• Storage: 256GB max
• Display: 12.2 inch touch screen
• Resolution: 1920x1200
• Supports an optional stylus with Wacom technology
• Comes with a detachable keyboard
• Dimensions (W x D x H): (mm) : 300 x 205 x 9.9 (tablet ) / 300 x 205 x 15.9 (with keyboard)
• Weight: 900 g, or 1.25kg with keyboard
• Battery life: 8hrs
• Ports: USB Type A + Type C, mini HDMI

And the key specs for the Yoga Book laptop:

• Processor: Intel® Atom™ x5-Z8550 Processor(2M Cache, Quad-Core, Up to 2.4 GHz)
• Operating System: Android or Windows 10 Home
• Memory: 4GB max
• Storage: 64GB max
• Card Slot : microSD up to 128GB
• Dimensions: (mm) : 256.6 x 9.6 x 170.8
• Weight: 690 g
• Display: 10.1 inch touch screen
• Resolution: 1920 x 1200
• Battery life: 13hrs
• Ports: None except the microSD slot

Miix 510 quick artist impression

The unit on display did not have any respectable drawing applications but thankfully my friend came prepared. He managed to install the Leonardo drawing app onto the Miix 510 and we played around with it a little.

The form factor of the Miix 510 feels quite solid.

Just like the Surface Pro 4, it comes with a kickstand behind and a detachable keyboard is included.

The Miix 510 is compatible with the Lenovo Active Pen which uses Wacom technology so it does support pressure sensitivity. However, the stylus is sold separately. The stylus comes with a pen holder that uses one USB port space, leaving only the remaining USB Type C port.

Drawing with the stylus is very responsive. I felt no lag. There's no parallax error because the screen is quite thin. Pressure sensitivity works fine. Unfortunately, the stylus suffers from slight jitter when slow diagonal lines are drawn.

Yoga Book quick artist impression

Yoga Book is an interesting product.

This is a 10.1 inch laptop with a touch keyboard that has no physical keys. The first thing that caught my attention was the size. This is really small, thin and light. It's a 690g laptop. On a hot day, you can probably pick it up to fan yourself with it. The only port included is the SD card slot.

Yoga Book comes with either Windows 10 Home or Android. If I were to get one, I would get one with Windows because there are more drawing apps on the Windows platform. My friend James Leong was using this with the Leonardo drawing app as well and there's no lag. However, he said that with other applications, he could felt some lag. The Intel Atom x5-Z8550 processor may not be powerful enough to run more intensive drawing applications.

The cool thing about this laptop is the touch keyboard has no physical keys. It's just a flat surface. With the included stylus you can draw on the keyboard surface just like you would on typical graphics tablets, e.g. Wacom tablets.

When you need to type, you can light up the keyboard with the press of a button. And when you want to draw, press the same button to switch to drawing mode.

Design of the hinge actually allows you to flip the keyboard all the way to the back. 360 degrees.

Another feature of the keyboard surface is it also allows you to put paper over it, and let you draw on the paper while it records what you're drawing. In this mode, it works like the Wacom Bamboo Slate and Bamboo Spark.

To prevent the paper from moving when you're drawing or writing on it, there's a clipboard to hold the paper down. It's magnetised and it will stick to the keyboard surface too. If the paper moves while you're drawing, there's going to be misalignment issues with the recording.

I'm not sure of the actual size of the paper so I can't confirm whether you can buy standard A5 notepads to use with the Yoga Book.

The included stylus uses two types of nib, the stylus nib and the ballpoint nib. To use it like a stylus, you need to use the stylus nib which is really just like any other hard tip nib. The tip is quite small though so it's good for drawing without blocking the screen.

The ballpoint nib is actually from those 7mm ballpoint refills. They use the Ministar refill here. I can't confirm if you can use other brands besides Ministar.

The pen supports up to 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity. I forgot to test for jitter when using the stylus tip though. Ballpoint tip has no problems at all and the laptop was able to capture all the strokes perfectly.

Conclusion

I wasn't able to test the Miix 510 and Yoga Book more extensively with the two hours I had. If I can get my hands on review units, I'll put out more detailed reviews. Meanwhile, you can check out my other drawing tablet reviews.