Lenovo has announced that the world's first 360 convertible laptop, the IdeaPad Yoga 11s which has the power and productivity of an Ultrabook and the mobility of a tablet, is now in the Philippines, available at Lenovo Exclusive Stores (LES) nationwide.

Small yet Powerful Ultrabook

The IdeaPad Yoga 11s converts into four special modes - laptop, tablet, stand and tent - to fit the changing ways people are using technology. It enables users to define which mode works best for them in their environments, from the park , coffee shop, in transit, at home or in the office.

Equipped with smooth Intel integrated high definition graphics and a Dolby Home Theatre audio, the IdeaPad Yoga 11s allows users to watch movies in a space-saving way through its tent mode.

The IdeaPad Yoga 11s stand mode is good for browsing through family photos using the 11.6-inch high definition in-plane swiching (IPS ) screen's 10-finger multi-touch support. It supports Motion Control, which allows hand gestures in front of the webcam to advance photos, videos and documents in a range of applications. In laptop mode, the IdeaPad Yoga 11s offers a great typing experience with its comfortable and responsive keyboard. The IdeaPad Yoga 11s tablet mode is ideal for exploring Windows 8 apps.

The slim, 0.68-inch frame of the new IdeaPad Yoga 11s comes equipped with up to a 3rd generation Intel Core i3 processor and is powered by Windows 8 for smooth multitasking and productivity to use Office applications.

The IdeaPad Yoga 11s has a 4GB DDR3 memory, a 128GB SSD storage, and a 6-hour battery life to keep users entertained and productive wherever they are.

Vicky Agorrilla, Country General Manager, Lenovo Philippines, said, "The IdeaPad Yoga 11s reflects superior craftsmanship expected from the world's leading consumer PC company. Featuring touch capabilities enabled by Windows 8, the IdeaPad Yoga 11s' multi-mode design and compact size will appeal to Filipinos who like to do their computing on-the-go."

The IdeaPad Yoga 11s is coated in an attractive rubber painting to give the exterior a soft finishing and is available locally in Clementine Orange.

The IdeaPad Yoga11s is available in Lenovo Exclusive Stores (LES) nationwide.

Read more here:
Flip, fold, multi-mode Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11s transforms to laptop, tablet, stand and tent

Various hiking trails in Boulder, 720-243-1376, yogiwalks.com, rajseymour.com

Instructor: Raj Seymour, of Boulder, has been teaching yoga for 51/2 years. He's been teaching Acroyoga for two years, and is trained in yoga-slacklining.

He also teaches a sports conditioning class at One Boulder Fitness, and he and his wife regularly perform and teach Acroyoga classes and run slacklining workshops. He also leads yoga teacher trainings at CorePower in Boulder.

Seymour also works for Open Space and Mountain Parks in the community education and outreach department, and he used to lead hikes for kids.

What is the workout? A combination of yoga and hiking around Chautauqua Park in small groups. Not like you'll be walking up the trails in crow pose or lunging the whole way. The class infuses aspects of yoga and meditation into a hike of 2 miles on uneven terrain with an elevation gain between 500 and 1,000 feet.

"It was a perfect fit for me being a yoga teacher and a naturalist," Seymour says.

We started with light yoga postures under the trees, then followed a 10-minute open-eyed, silent walking meditation. We hiked for about 45 minutes to an hour, with a break at the top of the overlook for a five-minute silent meditation. Class ended in the grassy park with a 30- to 45-minute yoga practice. We focused on the hamstrings, hip flexors and quads, which are the primary muscles used in hiking.

Yoga Hikes started last month as an extension of Boulder Walking Tours, which offers group tours of Pearl Street and other areas of town.

"It's not a fragmented, forced combination of two activities together," Seymour explains. "It's an integration of two mind-centering, peaceful, contemplative practices. Yoga and hiking can bring people to similar states of mind, which is the goal: the calming of the 'monkey mind,' the ceasing of the fluctuations of the mind."

What's different? Yoga after a vigorous hike feels different; the body and mind are settled, peaceful and focused. For me yoga outside (especially in the shade with the perfect breeze that we had) is dramatically more satisfying and nurturing. Plus, the grass feels better on your knees than a hardwood floor.

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Workout of the Week: Yoga Hike

Islamabad, July 17: After a yoga camp in India helped her rediscover and cleanse herself, a young Pakistani practitioner is trying to organise similar camps in the relatively safe locales here.

Aisha Chapra, a Karachi-based yoga teacher, found solace in yoga as she was trying to tide over a bad patch. She was depressed, disoriented and directionless and yoga gave her peace. But the real self-discovery came at a camp last year at Sivananda Kutir, on the banks of the river Ganga in Uttarkashi, where she was nicknamed "Sathya" by the "Mataji" in-charge of the ashram.

"We began with honouring Lord Ganesha, the remover of all obstacles, and suffering, and then we honoured Lord Vishnu, the preserver of our manifested universe," she posted on her blog. In the third week, with the full moon lunar eclipse close by, we offered flower, kum kum, and rice to the Divine Mother.

And in our last week we asked Lord Siva, the King of Dance, to pull us through the last of our blocks," she wrote. Chapra's first "incredibly successful" yoga holiday in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region was shortly after her India visit.

Now she is busy planning her second holiday in the picturesque Hindu Kush Heights. The exclusive holiday planned for September 21-28 is open to only 10 people and will cost over a lakh Pakistani rupees.

Asked to describe the difficulties encountered in organising her first camp, Chapra told PTI: "Well it wasn't difficult at all! Chitral is safe to travel to, and most of the guests had been wanting to visit Northern Pakistan, especially Hindu Kush Heights at Chitral, but had not found a group of people to go with and doing yoga was a really big attraction for most of the guests."

Chapra said, for her, the holiday was an "amazing learning experience as a yoga teacher". "We spent most of our days in Mastuj, a smaller village in upper Chitral, where we met lots of locals in our daily walks and practiced yoga on the beautiful grounds of the Mastuj Fort (Hindu Kush Hotel)," she said.

PTI

Excerpt from:
Yoga holiday for Pakistanis at Hindu Kush Heights

Lenovo has discontinued sales of the Yoga 11 convertible with Windows RT on its website, which analysts said was a sign of PC makers moving away from their commitment to the struggling OS.

A page on Lenovo's website stated the Yoga 11 is no longer being sold through its website, but said consumers "may still buy this product from a Lenovo retailer or reseller."

The Yoga 11 is being sold by a few retailers such as TigerDirect, which is selling the device for $495. The device is not being sold by Best Buy, which is instead selling the Yoga 11S, a hybrid released earlier this year with Windows 8 and an Intel Core processor.

The Yoga 11 hybrid was one of the handful of computers running Microsoft's Windows RT, which is designed for tablets. The Yoga 11's dual functionality allowed it to be laptop, and also a tablet when the screen was folded up.

Lenovo did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but the company is now selling ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops running Windows 8 and 7. Prices of other Windows RT tablets have also been dropping. Microsoft this week dropped the starting price of Surface RT to $349 from the original $499, while prices of RT tablets from Dell and Asus have also dropped to under $300.

Microsoft released Windows RT for ARM-based devices and Windows 8 for Intel-based devices in October last year. The price drops are an acknowledgement that Windows RT has failed, according to analysts. Some PC makers like Hewlett-Packard have shied away from RT, adopting Android or Windows 8 for their tablets instead.

Lenovo pulling Yoga 11 from its website shows the company's declining commitment to Windows RT, analysts said.

The Yoga 11 being pulled from the website shows Windows RT is not a priority for Lenovo, said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner.

"They will serve a need if there is one. But I don't think it is a focus," Milanesi said.

Devices such as the Yoga 11 will be replaced with fully functional Windows 8 tablets, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates in an e-mail.

Read more from the original source:
Lenovo drops Yoga 11 hybrid with Windows RT from online sales

Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga 11S: same idea, different size.

Andrew Cunningham

Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga lineup started with two laptops. One, the Yoga 13, is a 13-inch Intel Ultrabook that runs Windows 8. The other, the Yoga 11, is a Tegra 3 laptop running Windows RT.

The problem for Lenovo is that Windows RT hasn't really gone anywhere aside from those devices launched alongside Windows 8 (which included the Yoga and a handful of other convertibles and tablets, most notably Microsoft's own Surface). If you want to know how well the ARM-based convertible did for Lenovo, well, the company no longer sells it directly.

That leaves a hole in the Yoga lineup, and it's a hole that the new Yoga 11S is supposed to fill. It takes an 11-inch chassis similar to the standard Yoga 11 but adds Ivy Bridge-based Intel processors similar to those used by the Yoga 13. If the 11S had launched alongside the Yoga 13 in the first place, it would be easy to recommend to people who liked the Yoga line's signature flexible hinge but wanted something lighter. As it is, the laptop feels a few months late, and it fixes none of the minor issues we had with the 13-inch model back in November.

Visually, the Yoga 11S is in every way a smaller version of the Yoga 13. We were fans of the larger version's style, and that style has been retained here. The top and bottom of the laptop are a somewhat soft-feeling gray plastic (the laptop is also available in a bright "Clementine Orange") that sort of looks like aluminum but isn't. The palm rest is a more rubberized black plasticthe texture is different from the 13-inch model, but it's still quite fetching.

The laptop's body isn't tapered like some Ultrabooks, so it may appear slightly thicker or boxier than offerings like the MacBook Air or Asus ZenBook Prime. It's still thin0.67 inches, just like the 13-inch modelbut that thickness is constant throughout the body of the laptop. At 3.06 pounds, it's lighter than the 3.4 pound Yoga 13 but a bit heavier than the 2.38 and 2.96 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air, the 2.43 and 2.86 pounds of the 11-inch and 13-inch ZenBook Prime, or the 2.97 pounds of the touch-enabled 13-inch Kirabook. Even with the smaller model, you're looking at a laptop that outweighs the 13-inch versions of many of its competitors.

The 10-point touchscreen is both smaller and lower in resolution than the larger Yoga (1366768, down from 1600900), but it retains the larger version's excellent color and viewing angles. The screen also has a much larger bezel than in other Ultrabooks we've seen, which gives you a bit more room to grip the Yoga 11S if you're using it as a tablet. A physical Windows button is embedded below the screen.

The main draw of the Yoga lineup is its flippable hinge, which works exactly the same in both models. There are four "modes" that Lenovo advertises, of which two are functionally very similar: "Stand" and "Tent" mode are both designed to let you put the Yoga on a surface (flat or otherwise) and interact exclusively with the touchscreen. We commented in our last Yoga review that doing this left the (deactivated) keyboard and trackpad either pressed against your desk or exposed. But Lenovo has partially rectified that with the 11S by offering a $29 optional slip case that covers up the keys when they're not in use.

Andrew Cunningham

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Review: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga 11S is good, but it’s late to the party