Lenovo’s new Yoga Book replaces the keyboard with an E Ink screen
theverge.com
theverge.com
Regarding TFA typing on a flat surface sounds painful, at this point you effectively have a tablet-style keyboard. That being said I'm a keyboard snob who's currently typing on a mechanical keyboard with blank keys so I'm obviously not the target audience.
Not too hard to get the kindle store running on it iirc, never bothered though.
maybe just split the monitor down the middle (open up half your laptop? :-) and drag documents between each for the best [worst?] of both worlds
http://remarkablewiki.com/tech/specs
I use the remarkable for taking notes on online courses, and works wonders.
Seems I was wrong! I still maintain its very poor for reading papers I've found on my phone and then syncing the annotations.
Sweet, this is my second stupidest comment on this website.
Grayscale, italics, bold
You can manage a few words touch-typing but then things start drifting because there's no tactile feedback. And unlike an on-screen keyboard, you're not looking directly at it; that's the point of having a separate keyboard. I end up making mistakes even hunting-and-pecking.
I used the pen digitiser for a few minutes then concluded that it has no practical use. The included drawing app was useless for anything but doodling. It was fun to use it as a pointing device in Android, but only fun, not useful.
So I just use it as a tablet with a kick-stand, which is handy but doesn't play to the USP.
But let's face it, a second epaper screen is cool.
So I hope some care is given as to latencies and multi-value inputs. It would be great to have a mixer interface overlay running on this thing ..
Sounds like one loses the ergonomics of a keyboard but doesn't gain the full potential of a display. It's hard to see who this product is aimed at.
Knobs, drum pads, faders, and keys will always be better a reconfigurable touch pad for music.
The eink display is neat and great for navigation especially, handy for visual notifications on a desk, but otherwise not as useful or as cool as I expected. I kind of regretted buying it.
I'd buy it because I would find it perfect for reading, and I just love the feel, but guess it really depends.
the hardware itself is pretty nice, though.
Bringing experiments all the way to market is a good thing, just don't buy one and you are sorted.
Let's say e-ink keyboards are a good idea, but it's too soon. An early implementation will quite possibly delay (more make completely unviable) trying the experiment again.
If it's just a bad idea, resources will have been diverted into the development of a failed product (which is years of someones life spent on something useless). Not only that, but the cost of trying other ideas is increased. You have to hire and train more developers to work on other projects, to make up for the time wasted. The cost of developers increases for other companies, perhaps trying out better ideas.
This particular instance probably isn't very significant. But people apply the same logic to "what's the harm in VCs funding blockchains for pets", or any other buzzword without really understanding it. Well the harm is that they shift the entire ecosystem toward something that is possibly not very useful. They increase the costs for other companies (perhaps bootstrapping) their own ideas. And they push us toward a market that is driven by buzzwords, not logic, which is where most of us end up working.
And I think it's fine to be frustrated with stupid VC spending, but to the extent it is actually a problem, it shouldn't be sustainable (it would be replaced by less stupid spending if it were truly enjoining advancement).
The VC stuff... I'm not sure that it's not sustainable. The way VCs are selected is not totally efficient (I would say, not even very efficient). More than that, successful exits for VCs don't always mean that a product or service provided value to the world at large (or was a good use for limited engineering talent), there are lots of ways for a VC to get a successful exit without that happening (including a follow on investing giving them liquidity, before there is even a product on the market for example, or the company being acquired without having developed anything useful).
If they are wasting tons of money then they probably aren't the thing limiting advancement.
There's the problem of what "better" should mean, but private investors aren't going to fund government for fun (or similar), so many of the alternative meanings of better can't really be expected to inform a discussion about private investment. Like maybe stupid VC spending is evidence that tech companies aren't getting taxed enough, but that is solved by raising taxes, not by hand-wringing over questionable products.
Comfortable enough, yeah. But I really don't think the comparison is apt. Phone usage != laptop usage. I don't think you will find more than a handful of people comfortable with the idea of writing, say, a term paper on their iPhone/iPad/Surface/etc. touch keyboard. And those have been around for a long time.
I turned off the haptic feedback on mine as it's too distracting and to save battery. (The battery last a long time on it - about 8 hours watching movies on 50% brightness in airplane mode. Over 14 hours reading PDFs.)
I like the Yoga Book because it's super-thin, smooth, and has almost no moving parts. I think that's the future on mobile computing.
I do like the physical keyboard on my old Lenovo Yoga (S1?) Laptop though, and I won't be getting rid of that one any time soon.
(I swapped out the trackpad on the Yoga Laptop though, they made a mistake with that one which they've since corrected on later versions.)
Nothing about this is convenient except if your workflow involves you constantly changing keyboard layout for some reason.
A lot of products like this one already exist and do things better, MS Surface, iPad Pro etc.
I don't really understand what niche this fits in except for impulse buyers like myself.
edit: also on last gen there was no way to store the stylus, so I ended up losing it in a week or so. Feels like a pretty big oversight honestly, a problem that could be avoided with a simple pair of magnets.
However I've used it quite a bit since then for other things, mostly taking notes, watching videos, and reading PDFs when traveling.
My biggest complaint with the 1st gen was the single microUSB port, this new one looks like it has two USB C ports, that and better tech specs might make it worth getting.
Anyway I like the balance the X1 Yoga strikes : it has a regular Thinkpad keyboard which is nice to write code on AND it is a 2-in-1 touchscreen that you can flip into a tablet. The keys recess into the case when you flip it into tablet mode.
If it's done very very well it could be awesome: durable, reconfigurable, what's not to love? It would take getting used to but I can't see it being that bad. But it must be done incredibly well or it will suck.
Edit: For prolonged work I would always much prefer a real keyboard, but for that I have a USB Das Keyboard. When using the laptop on the go I'm less picky and more interested in other things too like durability.
All throughout the video I was thinking "I wonder how this fares against the Surface Go" but by the end the price was mentioned and... I'm afraid it's not a fair race. I thought the new Lenovo Book would be priced similarly as the previous version. Sad to see it isn't.
I have been reading about APL and it would be cool to have the keyboard display all the special keys also...
It would take me a while to get used to having to press a button to show the trackpad like on the Yoga Book. I like that it automatically hides when typing, but constantly having to bring it back up, to scroll in a small textarea for example, would be annoying.
Merging the touchbar and trackpad, kind of like that Asus laptop that came out recently would be interesting. I thought it would be awkward at first but a lot of reviewers seem to think it's useful.
Typing on a laptop keyboard usually isn’t considered ergonomic.
No one does them right. Not even Apple.
Works great. I guess I never actually click the trackpad with these settings.
Agree though, I'd get crazy without it.
(The behaviour of the touch, not the placement in the settings.)
I never use the Magic Trackpad though. It’s the best solution if you have to use a trackpad. A real mouse is still just plain better.
I use my laptop exclusively now and even on a desk I don’t use a mouse. The trackpad is fantastic on the new MBPs.
This isn’t relevant to the parent’s complaint, though. Without dedicated buttons, you’re relying on the driver to distinguish between a one and two finger click. That detection, even on Apple devices, is noticeably imperfect for reasons I don’t understand. (Click “anywhere” was solved by Apple with their haptic not-actually-clicking trackpads that are pretty awesome.)
Is there a particular use case that the
physical buttons are better for?
Every time I need to create a new folder. Every time I need to copy and paste. Every time I need to see additional information about a file. Every time I need to inspect an element on a web page. Every time I need to move something off my desktop. Every time I want to open in a new window.
Every time I want to do ANYTHING involving a right-click for a context menu WHICH IS ALLLLLLLLLL THE TIMMMMMMMMME.
Tap-to-click, and two-finger context click, are both unacceptable. They result in accidental clicks, and accidental context menus on scroll. Adding any gestures to most track pads results in accidental gestures, and chained combinations of unintended actions. I turn them off.
I don’t know if I can process that.
Not even Apple? That made me laugh. As best I can recall, Apple is to blame for no one having them. Apple introduced no buttons on their models and other manufacturers followed.
Since this article is about a Lenovo laptop, I'll point out that some Lenovo laptops (typically the big ones) still have physical left and right buttons for the trackpad. (I prefer their TrackPoint pointing sticks to trackpads myself, but that's a whole other discussion).
I'll point out that some Lenovo laptops
(typically the big ones) still have
physical left and right buttons for
the trackpad.
But the one thing that drives me nuts is the buttonless trackpad. This thing is utterly unusable. I've been trying everything: pushing it down with the finger that's doing the tracking; using another hand to use the trackpoint buttons; using the trackpoint itself... it's no use. Clicking on the odd link is ok, but doing any precision selecting, dragging or drawing is useless.
I used to be able to draw freehand with a good trackpad and a separate button under it. Now I struggle to drag a file over the right folder.
In hindsight, I should have bought an older model with actual buttons. This huge disadvantage trumps all the other benefits.
If so, I have a Lenovo Yoga laptop that did that too. I bought a regular trackpad from the same line off of eBay and swapped it out myself, it was quick and easy. I recommend doing that.
If this works I owe your a beer!
Yes, I'm referring to the whole trackpad that moves up and down. I have separate buttons for the trackpoint above the trackpad, but I cannot use them with my thumb. The whole layout has been driving me nuts!
Could you tell me which Yoga model you had and which trackpad did you buy?
Unfortunately, their first attempt at the magic trackpad worked poorly in that regard. I could never get the right click to engage reliably like I could on the macbook pro.