Hands on: Lenovo Yoga Tab 2 AnyPen review

Tim Danton January 7, 2015

One of the many things I’ve learnt through my years on this earth is this: my fingers are not very good at drawing text onto screens. I’ve learnt this thanks to the number of times I’ve lost styluses for my various PDAs over the years, or simply can’t find them when I most need to. Lenovo, I’m delighted to say, has come up with a rather magical solution: AnyPen. Follow all of the lastest news and reviews from CES 2015.

CES best tablet 2015 Lenovo Yoga Tab 2 Any Pen

More accurately, it should be called AnyPen-So-Long-As-It-Is-Conductive, but I guess that is a little less catchy. What that basically means is that there needs to be some metal in the nib of the device you’re using to etch patterns upon the screen.

Note the fact I use the word “nib” extremely loosely here. That could be anything from a lead pencil to a ballpoint pen to a screwdriver: it really doesn’t matter. Or, as Tom Butler, Lenovo’s worldwide director of notebook product marketing, demonstrated to me, a fork. The only restriction is that the metal needs to be around 1mm in diameter to be effective.

You may be worried that a screwdriver or pen could damage the screen surface, but Tom seems remarkably laissez-faire about such worries. He assured me that the Yoga uses a type of hardened glass – not Gorilla Glass on this occasion, but from a manufacturer called Asahi – and was remarkably hardy.

AnyPen makes its debut in the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 AnyPen, which in itself is already a remarkable little machine. It’s an 8in Full HD tablet that uses Windows 8.1, all powered by an Intel Atom Z3745 processor.

Remarkably, it offers 15 hours of battery life (according to Lenovo), and as you’d expect from a Lenovo machine bearing the Yoga brand it can bend any which way – including the “hang” mode shown above. Although we suspect most people will use it as shown in the top picture.

Other key specs include 2GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD, with a microSD slot that can increase storage by up to 64GB. Oh, and it weighs a mere 426g.

We don’t have a UK price for the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 AnyPen, but we’re hoping it will be around the £250 mark. It goes on sale in the US, at some point in January, for $299.