By For many years, Lenovo has been at the forefront of innovative laptop design, producing models with multiple displays, unique interfaces, and even foldable display panels. However, Lenovo iterates and improves, transforming intriguing concepts into enjoyable and occasionally profitable product lines, in contrast to most businesses that make these inventive modifications as one-off proof-of-concept models. As an illustration: With a second 13-inch OLED touch screen down south, the 2024 Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (model 13IMU9, beginning at $1,782 and $1,999.99 as tested) is a twin-display laptop that does away with the conventional keyboard and touchpad. Lenovo has produced this two-screen system for the past two years, upgrading it with new CPUs, faster memory, and better haptics while keeping the elegant physical design and stunning 13-inch OLED screens. What was the outcome? An even more superior hands-on experience from a 2-in-1 that matches the speeds and feeds of common creator laptops.
Configurations & Design
With the Yoga Book 9i (2024), the dual-screen design from the firm is what you will notice right away. Lenovo paired two OLED panels and connected them with a stylish 2-in-1 hinge to create one of the greatest dual-screen laptops available. The Yoga Book avoids the issues associated with folding screens, including warping, OLED panel deterioration over time, and innovative hinge designs that may not hold up over time. Lenovo’s laptop, on the other hand, has a robust 2-in-1 hinge that allows it to open all the way, lay flat, or even fold to become a tablet.
Before we start staring at OLEDs, let us sketch out the configurations. The same Intel Core Ultra 7 155U engine, supported by integrated graphics and 16GB of soldered-on LPDDR5X memory, powers all Yoga Book 9i versions from this year. Additionally, each arrangement features the same stunning OLED displays. The solid-state storage in the $1,782 starting model and the $1,999.99 tested version differs simply in that the former has 512GB of starting storage, while the latter has 1TB.
Every OLED screen is a 13-inch panel with 2.8K (2,880-by-1,800-pixel) resolution, touch and pen capability, and an incredibly pleasant glossy anti-fingerprint glass surface for both finger swipes and pen scribbles. You may open the entire piece to 180 degrees and use the two screens as a mobile dual-monitor setup because of the original design.
With an all-aluminum chassis that weighs 2.95 pounds and is 0.63 inches thick when closed, the Yoga Book’s design offers you far more screen real estate than any typical laptop while yet offering some of the best portability available. The chassis’ rounded edges make it easy to grasp, and the aluminum is stained a deep blue color known as “Tidal Teal.” Regardless of the laptop’s mode, the integrated soundbar on the hinge that joins the two parts produces excellent sound quality.
Content Creation
We use the same general productivity benchmarks on desktop and mobile platforms. Our first test is PCMark 10 from UL, which includes a storage subtest for the primary drive and replicates a range of real-world productivity and office tasks to gauge overall system performance.
Our other three benchmarks rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive applications by concentrating on the CPU and utilizing all of its cores and threads. Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro mimics popular apps like PDF rendering, speech recognition, and machine learning, while Maxon’s Cinebench R23 renders a complicated picture using the company’s Cinema 4D engine. Lastly, we transcode a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p quality (lower times are preferable) using the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4.
The workstation manufacturer Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop is the last program we use. It rates a PC’s performance for multimedia and content creation using Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s well-known image editor. This is an automatic plugin that does a wide range of standard GPU-accelerated Photoshop operations, such as opening, rotating, resizing, and saving images, as well as applying filters, gradient fills, and masks.
The Yoga Book 9i (2024) performed best in productivity, comfortably exceeding the 4,000-point benchmark for common products (such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and outperforming most rivals. Outperforming it was just the Asus Zenbook Duo (UX8406).
The majority of our processor-focused testing followed this trend. In both Cinebench and Geekbench, The Yoga Book maintained its second-place ranking and recorded the second-fastest time in HandBrake. It only made a mistake in Photoshop, where it lagged behind most of the competitors—even when compared to the model from the previous year.
Lenovo Yoga Book 9i 2-in-1 13.3″ 2.8K Dual Screen OLED Touch Laptop – Intel Core i7-1355U with 16GB Memory – 1TB SSD – Tidal Teal – US Version
Graphics
We use two DirectX 12 game simulations from UL’s 3DMark to test the graphics in all laptops and desktops: Time Spy, which is more demanding and best suited for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs, and Night Raid, which is more low-key and appropriate for laptops with integrated graphics.
We also perform two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which emphasizes both high-level, game-like picture rendering and low-level tasks like texturing, to further measure GPUs. The 1080p Car Chase test and the 1440p Aztec Ruins test, which are rendered offscreen to support varying display resolutions, are designed to test graphics and compute shaders through hardware tessellation and the OpenGL programming interface, respectively. It is preferable to have higher frames per second (fps).
In graphics tests, we first observed a similar distribution, with the Yoga Book 9i (2024) outperforming the HP Spectre Foldable PC and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16. However, the Asus Zenbook Duo (UX8406) was once again far ahead. Remarkably, the Yoga Book dropped in the ranks once again in our GFXBench graphics tests when the Zenbook did not run the test. It came in third place.
These systems will function similarly in practice because they use integrated graphics. Applications requiring a lot of graphics, like gaming, are not a good fit for them. Nevertheless, they will be perfect for working on PowerPoint presentations, streaming movies, and completing other simple content creation chores like digital drawing and photo editing.
Battery and Display
We play a locally saved 720p video file (the Blender movie Tears of Steel, which is open-source) with the display brightness set to 50% and the audio level set to 100% to test the battery life of each laptop and tablet. Before the test, we make sure the battery is completely charged and that the keyboard backlighting and Wi-Fi are off.
We also measure a laptop screen’s color saturation, or what proportion of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show, as well as its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) using a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to assess display performance.
The Yoga Book 9i (2024), which lasted just more than 7 hours in our battery test, is another example of how doubling up on screens has a predicted impact on battery life. And that is in laptop mode, where a keyboard covers the majority of the darkened bottom screen. That is a tad short in comparison to the competition: the HP SPectre Foldable and the Asus Zenbook both doubled that. The battery life suffers considerably more when using two screens; with both OLED panels lit, it only lasts three hours and twenty-two minutes. Once more, even with two screens, this is brief.
The screens themselves, nevertheless, are excellent. Accompanying the greatest displays available, the Yoga Book 9i covered 99% of DCI-P3 and 100% of the sRGB spectrum with ease. However, with displays taking center stage in this form factor, competition is particularly fierce: 100% is relatively common, and all of the books in the Yoga Book from the previous year received 100s.
In terms of brightness, the Asus Zenbook Duo and the Yoga Book from the previous year performed almost identically. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold 16, the only OLED screen to match or surpass the 400-nit brightness claimed by most, was the true victor. However, when used, all of these laptops will have a similar appearance; the main distinctions will come from the structural variations between two-screen and foldable panel designs.
Verdict
While dual-screen designs are still uncommon, the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (2024) demonstrates how a well-thought-out design can take something from gimmick to “gimme, gimme!” The device feels comfortable, the twin OLED displays look great, and the performance is strong enough to use it as your everyday vehicle. Of course, it has its share of peculiarities, like a spartan assortment of ports, a digital-only touchpad, and a bundle of supplies you will need to carry with you. However, there are similar difficulties for anyone purchasing a laptop with two or more screens.
Should you be in the market for an all-screen gadget, the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (2024) is a great option. Even if the battery life is not very long, it was inevitable with two high-resolution screens, and the two-screen arrangement avoids the drawbacks of foldables. Based only on performance, the Asus Zenbook Duo (UX8406) continues to be our Editor’s Choice winner for the time being, although Lenovo is vying with Asus for first place.
