Lenovo the Chinese technology company is doing what Apple is struggling to do, invent new products that are stylish cutting-edge today’s millennial audience of consumers who have grown up on a diet of tablets and smart phones.
This is no more evident than with the new YogaBook a product that was revealed at IFA in Berlin at the weekend, it already has retailers describing it as the hottest new product in 2016.
Five years in the making the YogaBook allows users to write and draw on a piece of paper and instantly see their creations digitised.
This is a product that has been designed for a specific target audience of consumers who have grown up touch typing according to Nick Reynolds marketing director Asia-Pacific for Lenovo.
According to Reynolds the PC market has become “boring” and the only way to cut through and bring consumers back to buying PC -related products is cutting-edge innovative design that appeals to consumers who have grown up touch typing on smart phones.
“The PC market is in serial decline, and what we are now witnessing is double digit decline with the exception of two in one notebooks. We knew that to grow we had to deliver a product that met the requirements that today’s millennial consumer wants” Reynolds said.
“These people who are sub 40 years of age they have grown up using smartphones and tablets. They are doing on a tablet what the over 40 market is using a notebook for they are the Touch Generation”.
“This audience could type faster on a BlackBerry keyboard than they could a normal keyboard and the new Yoga book is designed to appeal to an audience that wants a lightweight product and is the best of breed” said Reynolds.
Gavin O Hara a classic wrote on a Lenovo blog “It’s time for my complete confession and there’s no other way to say it: I was a tablet doubter. I saw that nifty thing from the famous fruit-named company and I wondered why people wanted to pay so much just to play Angry Birds and check their email. I used the original Lenovo tablets and could not for the life of me figure out how they would displace my phone and laptop”
“Gadget fatigue had gripped me. I didn’t want another device to carry. I didn’t want a vanity piece, a status symbol. And I didn’t want to be a walking cliché, the guy with the 49 gadgets”.
“Then, a couple of years ago, I got a Yoga Tablet. My stance softened. Even with my laptop dominating my work days, I started to see a path to relevance: getting my morning news on that big beautiful screen, doing light work in the evening, projecting movies on the wall for my kids. It was fun. But it stopped there.”
With this week’s announcement of the Yoga Book—a device I’m still getting my head around after 10 days of heavy use—I’ve completed the 180 in terms of how I view tablets. In my eyes, they’ve gone from irrelevant to fun to truly useful.
“That usefulness starts with an assumption our engineers clearly took to heart: We are not static. We do not sit still all day. We do not use a device the same way on a Saturday morning that we do on a Monday afternoon. We touch, we type, we draw, we write. We work, we play. If we’re lucky, maybe we even sketch the skeleton of an occasional dream.”
He claimed that the new Yoga Book—or rather the team that built it— “seems to truly get that we need it to be chameleon-esque. Here’s what stands out to me after more than a week of using it in all its guises.”
“It’s thinner than you can imagine (~4mm when open) and about as light as a clipboard(690g). I mention this not out of vanity but as a quality of life issue for students and people who are constantly on the move. If that matters to me, it will mean even more to a teenager lugging around a 10 kilo backpack.”
“The now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t keyboard is impossibly cool. (It’s a keyboard WITHOUT KEYS. Lenovo engineers are high-fiving somewhere right now.) But I’ll take useful over cool any day—my typing speed on it was unexpectedly high. It compares favourably to on-screen typing or those doofy snap-on keyboards (not a fan). And because the keyboard is virtual, our engineers were able to work in this crazy error prevention element. Based on data about the 7 most common typing errors, it adjusts the (virtual) sizes of certain keys. Bananas.”
“10 seconds into using it, I’m thinking “Digital pens have come a really long way.” The engineers told me the Yoga Book detects 2,048 levels of pressure, which means it notices incredibly subtle changes in what you’re drawing and how you’re drawing it. I love that. The twist with Yoga Book is that you can also take notes with an actual inkpen and they are simultaneously converted too digital. I am the son of two journalists so scribbling ugly notes is like a religion to me—blows my mind that I can do this.”
According to Reynolds the new Yoga Book will be on sale in Australia shortly. According to retailers who saw the new Lenovo offering at IFA this product will be one of the hottest products on offer during the peak Christmas New Year period.
One retailer who is set to range the products said I suspect that this product could be in short supply it is going to prove extremely popular as it has a multitude of uses for both the consumer and small medium business market.
