If you never felt the desire to test the integrity of the Yoga's hinge, you might never know the device's most impressive trick and thus always wonder why in the world this thing is called the Yoga. But if you open the clamshell, and push the screen back, and back, and back, you'll figure it out. The screen can rotate a full 360 degrees (minus however many separate one side of the base from the other), creating a bunch of different ways to use this device. You can rotate it all the way around, flip the thing around and hold it like a tablet with the screen facing you and the keys underneath your fingers on the back. Some people might not like that your fingers touch the keyboard as you hold it in tablet mode, but I didn't mind it, and it actually makes the Yoga a little easier to grip. You can prop the Yoga up like a teepee — I did so constantly, since it's an ideal way to watch movies. You can also use the keyboard tray as a stand for the display, as if the screen were mounted to the front of the base rather than the back. The hinge is sturdy enough to hold in almost any position, so anything you can think of you can probably pull off.

On one hand, it's all a bit of a gimmick. Flipping it around so it's "closed" with the screen facing out does make the Yoga much more like a tablet — a huge, giant, unwieldy tablet — but in every other setup it's still a screen and a stand. But there's something different when you can't see the keyboard — the screen doesn't feel so far away, and I found myself somehow more immersed than I normally am watching things on my laptop.

This is the way I hope Windows 8 laptops go. Instead of trying to find some happy medium between laptop and tablet, I hope manufacturers build devices that just add new use cases or form factors to the equation — a keyboard and mouse for a tablet, or an ersatz tablet mode for a laptop. Microsoft's own Surface falls into the no-man's-land between the two form factors, and suffers as a result. Meanwhile the Yoga is every ounce a laptop, it just does a cool extra thing most laptops don't. I like the flipping hinge more than the swiveling actions of the ThinkPad Twist, but either way I think the approach is right: don't build one device to replace two. Just pick one, nail the core experience, and crib a couple of features from the other.