That was always the promise of Pixel Qi screens. Shame they never hit critical mass. There are eink standalone monitors (e.g. http://dasungtech.com/ ) but nothing in a laptop form factor that I’m aware of.
The Dasung's Paperlike monitors are a bit expensive. Onyx Boox Max2 [0] seems a bit more recent, slightly larger, has many more features, including usage as an exterior monitor through HDMI. It's an android-based ereader, with extensive note-taking, drawing, pen writing, music sheet drawing features. It's also cheaper $500+, compared to Paperlike's $900+. I'm not a fan of bloat, which is where Max2 might be leaning, judging by a quick glance, but I'm enticed by it doubling as a large-format (portable) ereader.
Wow a HDMI input is so great, I've been looking for a tablet with something like that in order to make it double as extra monitor on the go. Tried duet with the iPad but it isn't good enough over lightning with video compression and such.
I was doing this with a Nook HD+ (still a pretty good deal second hand as a 9 inch HD screen if you see one cheap) and TwomonUSB a few years ago.
Not the most stable software in the world but it worked well enough as a second screen (hot reloading webpage and terminal stuff on it, code on my main screen)
I wonder why transflective displays are not more common for laptops. My hiking GPS has one and it's really great. The brighter the sun shines, the better you can read it.
My only personal experience with e-ink displays is from my almost decade old Kindle and that was way too slow to be usable interactively for anything complex. Has the state of the art improved to the point that coding on a e-ink display is viable? What about color?
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.
See my comment about hacked Nooks, they're both really cheap and looks super fast. In general newer e-ink displays can render new content without refreshing the entire screen like in the early days.
I wouldn't say they're super fast but a $20 Nook Glowlight is an absolute steal if you want to get someone a starter eReader. Load it up with a few books and they're off.
Not too hard to get the kindle store running on it iirc, never bothered though.
My Kindle Voyage has an amazing display and refreshes plenty fast (you can see the partial updates when moving the screen brightness setting up and down quickly). The only problem with it is that the screen is too small (physically). The same quality at 13+" would work great for Emacs + pdf reading.
Well. Just flip the laptop, enable the on screen keyboard and wait for the screen hack thingy that will enable the use of the e-ink as the main screen to be released on github.
As someone who had a Kobo EReader a long while ago; coding on eink is painful. The screen latency and constantly flashing will ruin your day even with the joy of being able to code in bright daylight. Unless there is some magic advancements in eink latency that I don't know about...
I've seen hacks on the Nook Simple¹ allowing for even runnig PSX games with good refresh-rate, ever since I saw those demos I've been dreaming about a decent resolution EINK screen for my terminal sessions.
I want an e-ink display on which I can read scientific papers. Sadly, this isn't possible unless the whole paper fits on the screen, because scrolling on e-ink quickly becomes a real chore due to the refresh rate.
What about the Remarkable (https://remarkable.com/)? It's both got a larger screen and it's supposed to have a vastly improved refresh rate. I haven't tried it, but I'm really really curious about it.
It's beautiful hardware matched with absolutely horrid software. It's Android 4.0, which means literally nothing works. They've tried to fix it with custom apps, but I still can't achieve a decent work-flow and there's no community to make it better. It's actually the worst.
Nothing shameful about making a mistake, happens to the best of us. But you might want to edit your first comment to point out that you were referring to a different device in case people don't make it this far down the comment thread.
Do you have a citation or reference for this? Being stuck on and depending on Android 4 would be a downer but it doesn’t seem to be the case from a cursory look. Or maybe I’m just wishfully hoping it’s not the case.
There are e-readers out there big enough for this: the Onyx Boox Max2 and Sony DPT-RP1 (and possibly others). They’re expensive, but if you’re willing to shell out for a dedicated device for this purpose they work well.
Yep, same here. E-ink screen and keyboard is all I need; I'd be totally fine with black&white, I'd just switch Emacs to monochrome coloring (using different fonts and bolds/italics/underlines instead of regular syntax coloring).
I came here to say the same thing. I might have to make it myself which is looking increasingly possible. Useful displays aren't even that expensive, a 13.3" 1600x1200 display _module_ (not including driver) is $450, making a mechanical keyboard is easy, SBCs like the ODROID XU4 are plenty fast. Just a small matter of finding a few months of spare time /s
bringing experiments all the way to market is really only good if anyone cares to try them out. if no one cares to try them then that experiment has failed in the market.
Okay, but my point is that the other poster is responding to the idea, not the implementation. If people that have used it say it stinks, then we have some information.
Bringing experiments all the way to market is a good way of wasting lots of precious natural resources. The more you can test a design before it hits Chinese megafactories and worldwide distribution centers, the better for the planet.
It's probably not very bad, but stupid experiments can have a negative influence on the community as a whole.
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.
This presumes we can choose the right path without mistakes. It's a silly presumption.
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).
I agree, we can't proceed without mistakes. But it's incorrect to say that there is no cost, and that we shouldn't minimise mistakes (which is what the comment I was replying to was implying).
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 the money is there to waste, you have some evidence that no one has a better idea about how to deploy the resources.
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.
I've typed on one of these (same style i.e. a projection keyboard) and it's not that bad, the zero-tactile feedback takes some getting used to but my wpm doesn't suffer too much. I also only type at 70-120 wpm and never purchased a 'nice' keyboard so I'm certainly not a typing/keyboard enthusiast.
I think a keyboard with each individual key being e-ink would be pretty cool.
Haptics will definitely help the feel. I imagine it would take a few weeks of use to evaluate if it's a workable solution for you. I'm very interested to hear what the reviews say about it.
The video showing the guy typing and the sound of the haptic feedback gives you a good idea of what it feels like. Watching it I can see how it might work well. I am sure it would take some getting used to. I can also see how some people's initial reaction might be similar to the reaction a lot of people had to the original iPhone. Of course now most people are very comfortable typing on a touchscreen phone keyboard.
>Of course now most people are very comfortable typing on a touchscreen phone keyboard.
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.
You could always have a thin removable plastic pad on the top of the keyboard that would fake the buttons and provide the tactile feedback, while still allowing for small factor, easy cleanup and longevity of the touchscreen interface.
I have the first generation Lenovo Yoga Book. It's actually okay to type on. I'm not the best typer, but I have some decent muscle memory and my typing on that thing is about 95% accurate (one typo about every third word). It's good enough that I can correct any typos later and not take away from the other benefits of the design. I feel that I lose that accuracy because the "keyboard" is smaller than what I'm usee to.
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 always turn on 'tap to click' on my trackpad so you can tap anywhere to click, and two finger tap to right click. I haven't missed physical buttons since getting used to this. Is there a particular use case that the physical buttons are better for? I can imagine gaming at least.
This is by far the best setup for the trackpad. Ever since discovering 3-finger drag, I can't live without it. I don't understand why not everyone uses it, and why Apple decided to move it from the main settings screen to the accessibility settings.
Absolutely this. It is hands down the best possible set up for a trackpad. I like this so much that I actually bought a Magic Trackpad so I can do these things when I’m plugged in to my main desk setup.
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 did the same, bought a magic trackpad and preferred mouse. But I think the problem is placement. Keeping trackpad to the right of keyboard somehow makea it harder to use for me.
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.
On most devices tap-to-click is on by default. It’s always the first thing I turn off. I have always found it completely useless and it turns incidental touches into accidental clicks. “Oops, guess I sent that email.”
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.)
I didn’t love the massive size of the new trackpads but it took me all of 5 minutes to adapt to the click. Happy to trade off a real click for click-anywhere behavior (and potentially better durability). Although I found the trackpad didn’t actually click well along the right edge. No idea what that was about.
This is probably a personal preference thing. It's always the first thing I turn off too, even on linux. No amount of tinkering with the settings ever got me to a "sweet spot" where I'm not accidentally clicking things.
On MacOs, it's not possible to tun off the tap-to-drag release delay. So you may often end up dragging stuff around even after you think you're done dragging. The physical button helps ensure you get it right when you really need to (so the use case for the physical button is a workaround for the wonky software).
Is there a particular use case that the
physical buttons are better for?
EVERYTHING.
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 never use right-click (either on mouse or on the touchpad) actually, I use much more "middle-click" (I trigger it with 3 touch tap) for opening links in new tabs, pasting clipboard, ...
and like someone else mentioned, tap action is for left-click
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 have a Yoga P40. It's a great machine. The CPU, RAM, and SSD are very fast: I can compile heavy stuff in a blink. The HDPI display is gorgeous: I can open it 180° or 360° and sketch or paint on it with an active pen. The keyboard is not bad. It's not mechanical, but it doesn't tire my hands as others do.
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.
Are you refering to the trackpad that doesn't have buttons, and the whole trackpad moves down when you click?
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.
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!
I actually really liked the way Apple handled it on their 17 inch macbook pro. It had one physical button at the bottom of the trackpad that stretched the entire width of the trackpad. If you wanted to right click, you put two fingers on the trackpad and clicked with the thumb. It worked great.
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.
E-ink displays are awesome and Lenovo never stops innovating. I am bit skeptical about the keyboard feel though.
I really hope that they will take in consideration a double screen for phones too, something like the YotaPhone.
I get some serious flashbacks to my old Atari 400 when I think of typing on this thing. It was not the most pleasant typing experience. I guess that it might not matter as I “dock” my laptop when I am at my desk where I do most of my typing.
I loved the idea of the yotaphone and bought the second version (using it to write this) but it's actually the worst phone I've ever owned by a wide margin. The hardware quality is not great and it's stuck on a very old version of Android.
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 something similar to YotaPhone, but:
- Updates
- Active mod community, when updates stop (this happens too soon nowadays and Yota is an example)
- Bigger screen, something close to 6 inch.
I'd buy it because I would find it perfect for reading, and I just love the feel, but guess it really depends.
if the keyboard has similar characteristics to the android yogabook, then I'm skeptical as well. I have one, and while the device itself is pretty darned neat, the keyboard leaves a lot to be desired. the haptic feedback helps some, but the keys often don't register.
I think this has a lot of potential to be a revolutionary product segment for musicians, for example. So much great music software is out there, literally impeded by not having such a great input mechanism - with something like a reconfigurable keyboard area, it means many different kinds of (musical) user interaction may be defined in the near future .. an interface for mixing, a drum-pad, complex synthesis models rendered in a way for user interaction across multiple domains - I can think of as many uses for this device, as there are iPad apps for musicians.
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 ..
This would make a ton of sense as a peripheral device. An e-ink input that can change buttons for any variety of modes you can imagine. I can't see what good there would be in replacing a physical keyboard rather than supplementing it.
It's funny that you mention musicians in context of e-ink. This thread lead me to find a review of Onyx Boox Max2, which is an ereader creammed with features. One of them is writing music sheets, as seen in this review [0].
"The display can’t show any arbitrary app, unfortunately. You can read and mark up PDFs with it, but that’s pretty much the extent of what you can put on the display."
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.
I remember first checking out the Lenovo Book at a local store and being mightily impressed with the hardware (bar the keyboard).
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.
They already have haptic feedback on their trackpad, which is non mechanical. Merging the touchbar and trackpad would make a lot of sense; it's a lot of real estate to waste. Oled is the way to go here though. That's what they did with the touchbar.
The haptic feedback on the trackpad is amazing. I totally forget that it's not mechanical. I really dislike how big it is though. I know Apple tries to prevent false signals (e.g. palm touches when typing) with software but I just don't think it will ever work well enough to not be annoying.
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.
You can't rest fingers on this touch keyboard the same way you can on phisical keyboard (laying hand on a keys without enogh force to push the keys). I would not be confortable of hovering hand all the time - usually I rest my fingers on keycaps when in idle mode (not actively hovering above the keyboard)
This was the first thing that made me realise it wouldn't work for me also. I wonder if they'll be able to come up with a way to measure input force as a workaround
Bought the last generation of this on a whim, used it maybe an hour since then.
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.
I have a first generation Lenovo Yoga Book too. I mainly purchased it on a whim too - thought I would use it for some specific purpuse, but never did.
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.
My speculation for a while is that the touch bar on the Mac is a foot in the door toward eventually replacing the entire bottom surface of the Mac with a haptic virtual keyboard.
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.
I have a first generation one of these. I find the 'halo keyboard' very difficult to type on (then again, I find touchscreen keyboards very difficult to type on).
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.
You can already have audible (and I think vibration) feedback. That doesn't tell you when you're drifting off they keys. Only feeling the edge or tangent of a key will do that.
I'd guess that haptic feedback would be similar.
What's missing is the feeling of raised keys. If the epaper additionally could selectively raise areas by about one or two millimeters (about 1/16 inch) then it would be perfect.
DIY solution: Perhaps buying a sheet of screen protecting plastic, and carefully cutting transparent square pieces for keys (or the negative: a grid of 1mm lanes for spaces among keys, and let the keys be holes) would be perfect for position feedback on the fingertips.
With every iteration, Lenovo seems compelled to further reduce the typing experience. They went from having awesome keyboards to having keyless keyboards. I guess I won't be getting any new Yoga devices then.
I personally think there will be a market for it. People are already somewhat use to "typing" on tablet and phone screens (I make more mistakes using my thumbs on my phone screen than typing normally on the 1st gen Yoga Book).
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.)
Next generation Apple MacBook will look like an improved version of this. It will look stunning and be very uncomfortable to use. It will have a single USB-C slot, nothing else. Battery time will be 20 hours since they can put one where the keyboard was before.
Unrelated. I wish there was an E-Ink baby monitor. The glow at night of the typical baby monitor is pretty terrible. The harsh blue screen is not ideal and I keep thinking if it looked like an e-Ink screen it would be a lot easier to sleep next to.
I have a Lenovo X1 Yoga which, confusingly, is completely different from the "non X1" Yoga rviewed here. Also not to be confused with the X1 Carbon which is pretty much the same product as the X1 Yoga but belongs to a different line. Thanks for the clarity Lenovo.
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.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] thread[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdRFMWff5CI
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17885138
Not too hard to get the kindle store running on it iirc, never bothered though.
https://youtu.be/i3wP-GSG1NY?t=242
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH0wAmMbFgI
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard
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.)
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.)
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.
and like someone else mentioned, tap action is for left-click
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).
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.
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.
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 ..
[0] https://youtu.be/fdRFMWff5CI?t=8m3s
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I have been reading about APL and it would be cool to have the keyboard display all the special keys also...
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.