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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a wonderful idea, given that touchscreen responsiveness and power optimization have been a focus of research over the last decade. At worst it's a touch pad, at best it's so much more. Of course a lot depends on how software developers will embrace it - and I hope Linux users get some love. (I wish Asus and reviewers will stay away from gimmicks like watching movies on it.)

In any case, far better than removing a set of useful keys from the top of a physical keyboard.

Add: this also enables new types of casual games, similar to Wordament, Angry Birds etc. Oh, and better smudge tools on Photoshop.

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At first sight the thing is terrifying, but it seems a rather quite reasonable alternative play on the touchbar that does not mess with the ability to sell the device. Two massive benefits: the tactile response of the keyboard is totally preserved, and the feature can be entirely disabled for conservative users who cannot think of an immediate use for the display.

Clearly it will appeal to gadgeteers (as much as I expect the touchbar does) who can use it for instrumentation or other generally distracting applications. Then there is the blindingly obvious: video editing on a laptop always sucks, there is never enough screen space. But moving the monitor window (rendered video preview) to the touchpad area might change that considerably -- it amounts to a 25% increase in display area, and in a 'natural application' of video editing, the monitor would be separate anyway.

I think this design, simply by virtue of being optional, and large and rectangular, is hugely more applicable than the touchbar.

The modality (pumping F6 to enable/disable) could definitely be improved upon. I can imagine it quite natural to use a hot corner of the pad itself as a toggle, or perhaps some gesture or similar.

Very excited to see how these work out in the real world

     moving the monitor window (rendered video preview) to
     the touchpad area might change that considerably

It'll boost sales of neck-strain relief products, at a minimum.

I like my touchbar and I think I'd probably like a touchscreen trackpad too. The key in my opinion is the programability of the 'buttons'. They don't need to be just buttons, you can have sliders, video scrubbers, button hierarchies (button menus) and so on.

I'm also up for dual display laptops where the clamshell of a laptop is two touchscreens. It would help water proof the device, simplify the mechanics (lower cost?), give options for keyboard layout (improved ergonomics?) increase full screen size when fully unfolded and might be more comfortable than the stiff keys on the latest gen of MBP. I use an external keyboard when I'm at my desk and want a tactile full size keyboard, so I wouldn't be stuck with only glass.

A TouchPad has too many negatives.

It costs additional power (with no clear benefit).

Its another point of failure.

It has a big learning curve.

It requires one to look away from the screen (pro users needn't to look at their keyboard).

It replaced something which worked very well: esc key and function keys (who also had F-keys with "fn" combo).

IMO it is an interesting usability concept from an R&D PoV, but not something to be shoved in the throat of users. Unfortunately, Apple decided it is the way forward for MBP users with no option to turn back except for legacy products or switching ship.

Is there a way to "attach" a tablet to a W10 laptop as an extra monitor? It makes sense but don't think I've been able to find a viable solution.

A Windows 10 tablet (I can't name one, but some probably exist) has this out of the box with the wireless screen projection (win+K). I had to do this laptop to laptop to projector for a lightning talk once after the first laptop had a broken display port adapter - surprisingly fast to setup and 0 latency.

I'd be surprised if something didn't exist for Android tablets. But if you have an old laptop laying around, maybe throw w10 on it and see if it works?

Not all Win 10 tablets support the wireless projection. I think you can do it with a higher end one like a Surface Pro, but you can't with less powerful ones like the Asus Vivotab 8. You'll get an error message having to do with not meeting the minimum requirements.

On the other hand, you can use something like Synergy, but that's not quite the same thing.

I think this is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracast ?

I use Spacedesk for this. It supports Windows as the server and Android, iOS, Windows and web browsers as clients (extra displays). It's still in beta, but it works almost flawlessly. If your wifi chips are good quality, the latency is almost unnoticeable.

Thx. I was looking for a Win / Android solution. I'll have to check this out.

yeah if you have an iOS tablet, check out duet. works well on my ipad pro

You're forgetting that a screen costs power.

Besides, at best, your touchpad has little fingerprints, at worst it has a lot. With a normal touchpad this doesn't matter, but with a touchscreen (or touchpad-touchscreen) it suddenly does. Furthermore, it is a spot where your hands are, so in order to see it, you gotta move your hands. Both are not very useful features. If I want a tablet, I'll get one instead. Furthermore, the touchpad is pretty small (compared to Apple's latest) and doesn't have the haptic feedback the latest have. Though mine doesn't have that either on the MBP 2015, but that's because I don't want butterfly keyboard or TouchBar.

I'll put this one in the category of the TouchBar (which has already been discussed to death): with all honesty a very interesting research product indeed but don't put in your flagship product please. TYVM /bow.

The impact on battery life is marginal. The ZenBook Pro 15 has a 71Wh battery and "up to" nine hours of battery life. An iPhone 8 has a 10.5Wh battery.

Real-world power consumption for a good smartphone display is ~500mW. That represents just under 5% of the iPhone 8's battery capacity per hour, but 0.7% of the ZenBook's battery.

In the worst-case scenario, the touchpad display will reduce battery life from 9 hours to 8.5 hours. In a more realistic scenario, the power consumption of the touchpad display is a rounding error compared to the consumption of the i9-8950HK processor, the GTX 1050 GPU and the 4K main display.

Somehow, people cope with their smartphone being covered in fingerprints.

The article reports several hours battery life difference.

The point is that its on top of the thing it replaced (keyboard). It doesn't matter much if its 10 minutes or 30 minutes, its an unnecessary waste in both situations.

> Somehow, people cope with their smartphone being covered in fingerprints.

I don't, but if I mostly type and scroll on the bottom, the fingerprints are mostly on the keyboard part. So I tend to read the top and maybe mid of my screen and then scroll further.

I actually preferred the time with hardware keyboards for example because screen stayed pristine back then, and phones were much more durable. Alas, those phones are exceptions, and if you also have other special interests such as long-term support, high uptime on one juice load, or the liberty to e.g. run SailfishOS your options quickly diminish. So my smartphone does not have a hardware keyboard, but that does not mean I don't prefer that. Choosing a smartphone is a matter of concessions. Choosing a MBP, idem.

Finally, given how often people are replacing their smartphones, I'm not exactly sure if "people cope with their smartphone" in general.

This is what happens when things are built to sell, not built to use.

I would certainly use this. I will also buy it if it supports linux out of the box.

When I first saw the Dave2D video on Youtube a couple of days ago, I thought it would be a useless feature, but on further consideration, I'd totally use it.

I have an Zenbook ux501 that runs on wired power most of the time anyways so battery life isn't a concern for me personally, but I'd use that touchscreen as a security cam monitor, system resource monitor or some type of dashboard. I use a mouse most of the time anyways, so most laptop touchpads are useless to me.

I'd love a second Mon for everything from man pages to a screen for a soccer game. I use mostly key bindings so it wouldn't be too much for me.

Office appears to have non-trivial ribbon integration:

> The [Excel and Word] ribbon where they live occupies 20% of the screen on the ZenBook Pro, so shifting those functions to the top edge of the trackpad gives you more space to do your work.

https://edgeup.asus.com/2018/take-control-with-the-zenbook-p...

I'm actually surprised it hasn't been tried before. It sounds super cool but I wonder if it's still a bit of a gimmick (and you end up just using it in touch pad mode all the time).

It still has the problem where you have to take your eyes off your screen in order to interact with it, so I imagine there'd be some effort involved in getting used to actually looking at the touch pad while you poke at it. That said, if there are good app integrations that are intuitive and turn the thing into more than a pointing device (and not just a Spotify controller or some such), then I'm interested to see what those could be.

It'd be quite nice, for example, if it allowed notifications to pop up on a part of the touchpad instead of obscuring what you're working on, allowing you to tap that part of the touchpad to open it up instead of moving the pointer to the corner of the screen.

Razer something similar about 5 years ago.[1] I personally really like the idea. Feels more functional than a bar and should be easily dropped into "dumb touchpad" functionality if the user wants to save battery life or just doesn't need it. Would be nice to see this migrate across the entire laptop pc segment.

[1]https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pc...

I would be shocked if Apple didn't prototype this while working on design for the Touch Bar.

I wonder if it's viable to add a mirror above the monitor so it's visibility could be at eye level.

I can see this being useful for things like chat windows, especially if you're using an external mouse.

I'd like to run a terminal output on the touchscreen. Launcher sounds okay, but the one I have with Enlightenment 22 is just so much faster with the keyboard than any pointer device ever could be.

Isn't it too small?

It's Full-HD on 5.5 inches, so you can likely fit fairly dense text on there.

It's going to eat quite a bit of battery life and cost more for a minor benifit. This is simply a gimmick to differentiate from the hurd.

Pretty good point, Mac OS is already using the touch pad to input signatures (you use the touch pad as paper and your finger as a pencil) which works extremely well but currently has no visual feedback, there is probably space for much more useful applications when that becomes available. I just really has to be an OLED display though.

> which works extremely well but currently has no visual feedback

Why isn't that plus haptic feedback good enough for the examples you mentioned?

No it's perfectly fine, I just meant I can imagine there are lots of other applications of the touch pad that are currently limited by this

Re linux support, my bet is that the small screen is just another eDP and easy peasy to use.

Ahh, expecting hardware vendors to behave in a sane and rational manner. Good luck with that ;)

> I think this is a wonderful idea, given that touchscreen responsiveness and power optimization have been a focus of research over the last decade.

Are you familiar with the state of the art? Is this thing going to be as responsive as a regular touchpad?

IIRC touchpads and capacitive touchscreens use the exact same technology, so there shouldn't be any difference.

Yes, but touchpads aren't constrained by the necessity of having an integrated high tech light source and a transparent layer on top of it.

Do phone screen noticeably lag these days? I don’t see why there would be a difference.

It also looks to me like the design language is easily borrowed from mobile devices!

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