New: Lenovo’s Yoga A12 is a cheap Android laptop available in Rose Gold

It’s rare for a laptop or tablet from a company like Lenovo to feel fresh and innovative, but the Yoga Book, released in both Android and Windows 10 varieties, was exactly that. The Yoga Book featured a weird, but cool glass keyboard that doubled as a Wacom tablet. You could write your notes above the keyboard with a pen or use it like a normal laptop, just without a real keyboard. It was more like using an iPad keyboard, but with a dedicated glass pane that didn’t cover the screen but still also didn’t feature tactile keys.

Now, with rumours of a Chrome OS-based Yoga Book flying around, Lenovo has instead decided to announce the Yoga A12, which is a 12" version of the Yoga Book, just without the interesting pen-input feature. This new tablet has a 12.2-inch screen, only runs Android (for now), runs on an Intel Atom x5 processor, with 32GB of storage and 2GB of RAM.

If Lenovo somehow made a Yoga Book with pen-input and Chrome OS it’d be an instant buy for me, but with just Android and no pen-input this US$299 tablet is a bit too meh for my liking. Even Google doesn’t really give a shit about Android on tablets anymore, while Chrome OS can now run Android apps, meaning the platform ships with a better browser and native Android apps.

When: TBA Australia, February in the US.

How Much: US$299.