Lenovo Yoga Book 9i initial review: A versatile package

Lenovo’s Yoga family has thrown up some of the most diverse devices over the past few years and the Yoga Book 9i fits perfectly into this flexible family.

The Yoga Book is a Windows laptop, foregoing the physical keyboard for a pair of screens and coming with an external keyboard and unique origami stand and pen. We caught up with the Yoga Book 9i at CES 2023 to put it through its paces.

Design

299.1 x 209.9 x 15.95mm, 1.38kgStand, pen, keyboard accessories

First and foremost, the Yoga Book 9i is a laptop. It has a classic clamshell design, meaning you can lift the lid and get to work, or shut the lid leaving you with a package that looks like a regular slim laptop.

The difference is that Lenovo has equipped the 9i with a pair of displays. There’s a 13-inch display on both the top and bottom halves and no physical keyboard.

The sample we saw was finished in a nice Tidal Teal colour, and as per other Yoga Books, there’s a flexible hinge between the two halves so you can basically set the screens at any angle to each other.

The package feels high quality and first impressions of the laptop side of things are great – but it’s the stand that really, ahem, stands out.

Called the origami stand, it folds to make a supporting structure that will allow you to essentially set the Yoga Book 9i up so you can view both displays at once. It effectively makes a dual-screen package out of your laptop.

The device can be set in either landscape or portrait on the stand, so you have real flexibility how you use it, while the stand also accommodates the pen and gives you a place to slot in the accessory keyboard too.

With no physical keyboard on the Yoga Book 9i, there’s an external Bluetooth keyboard, which can be used separately, as part of the stand, or placed over the lower screen to create a more conventional laptop arrangement.

The final design detail that’s nice is that the stand folds down and creates a little cover you can house the keyboard in, so you can keep it safe – it’s very clever.

Display and hardware

2x 13.3in 2.8K OLED, 400 nits, 60Hz, Dolby VisionUp to Intel Core i7 U, Intel Iris Xe, 16GB RAM, 512GB/1TB

The two displays are OLED, with a 2.8K resolution and a brightness of 400 nits. That’s not the brightest out there, but these displays are also HDR and Dolby Vision capable, so hold some promise for showing off your content.

Both are a 16:10 aspect, so very much conventional when used as a single laptop display, however, there are in-built features to get more from them. You can use an on-screen gesture to switch to waterfall mode, essentially using both displays for the same content. Have a long webpage? You can now have that flowing over both screens.

You can also flick content from one screen to the other with your fingers, while also being able to summon or dismiss the on-screen keyboard. This is in addition to standard Windows display options.

First impressions are good, but we really didn’t have time to fully assess the display performance. Naturally, this is a device that will be better suited to working at a desk, because once you start using the stand, you’ll need greater stability – it’s not really something you can deploy on an aeroplane for example.

There’s power up to Intel Core i7 U, with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD storage or 1TB, but from the time we spent with it, we really couldn’t test the performance or thermal management or anything else.

Around the chassis you have three USB-C connections, all with Thunderbolt 4. There are Bowers & Wilkins speakers included too, offering Dolby Atmos, although we didn’t have the chance to test these.

It’s all about versatility

While the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i might strike you as rather eccentric, there’s the immediate advantage it offers in having two displays. You can view a document on one page while working on another, or you can scroll further, escaping the normal limitations of a small screen.

For mobile workers, of course, being able to arrive at a desk and deploy the 9i with give you some advantages.

But it does mean essentially carrying around two bundles, the laptop itself and the keyboard and stand. There’s a compromise should you want to work off your lap, where a fixed keyboard would be better, but we’re drawn to the creativity that Lenovo has shown.