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Lenovo's 'Yoga Book' Laptop Is So Thin It Needs A Touchscreen Keyboard (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: At IFA in Berlin, Lenovo announced the Yoga Book, a laptop that measures in at just 0.38-inches thick, making it the thinnest laptop currently available. In order for it to retain such a slim profile, the keyboard needed to be redesigned. The Yoga Book features what is called the Halo Keyboard, a touchscreen keyboard that is separated from the display and doubles as a drawing tablet. Gizmodo reports: "Officially it's called the Halo Keyboard, and if you've ever tried to quickly type on a tablet's software keyboard than you'll be familiar with the experience. Only it's a little nicer because the keyboard is separated from the display, so it doesn't suck up screen real estate, and it has a pleasantly rough texture. It's also got haptic feedback, which in the case of a touchscreen keyboard is sort of like sticking lipstick on the pig. A press of a button turns the keys off and turns the keyboard into a drawing tablet. From there, it behaves a lot like a Wacom tablet, directly reporting pen input into your chosen app. It even reads pen inputs through paper laid over the input panel." Some other specs of this 2-in-1 laptop/tablet include an Intel Atom processor, 64GB of onboard storage with support for a microSD card, 13 hours of battery life, 4G LTE, 802.11 AC Wi-Fi, front and rear cameras, and a 10.1-inch, 1080p display.
So it is 10mm thick (or rather 9.6). It is not remarkable. I have a Dell that isn't much thicker at 13mm. I also have a tablet with removable keyboard (A laptop) that comes at less than that. Also Atom - Intel's garbage.. Not interested. Give me a Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake any day (XXXXU processors), but the Atom/Braswell/Bay trail/Cherry Trail are the utter crap
The most interesting thing about this is:
"Touch-typists used the Moving Virtual Layout (MVL), which adapted to fit the user’s natural style, learning where the user intended to strike the keys through experience. On a mechanical keyboard, the user could dynamically adjust the position of their fingers onto the keys, helped by the shape of the keys and gaps in between. To overcome this problem on a touch keyboard, the halo keyboard used artificial learning to correct repeated mistakes or mistyping, learning the difference between common errors, like when a user hits the Alt key but intended to hit the spacebar instead."
THe MS Surface is still the thinnest and Lenovo comes with malware like spearfish by default .... oh and the spyware is installed as drivers which means even if you do a fresh install Windows Store will automatically install the crapware again making it perpetual and impossible to remove!
Fuck em. I will never buy a product from such a company.
http://saveie6.com/
what is this obsession with making things thin, the space it saves is almost irrelevant and tactile feed back is a wonderful thing.
No idea, and the company themselves don't really push that it's just a factor of what they're building - ie if they put a real keyboard in it it couldn't be a drawing-tablet with a pen also. It's an obsession of the article headline writer. Something far more interesting I think about it is that you can put paper over it and write on that, with the pen input also copied digitally.
Amen to that.
The real problem, IMHO, is that when I type, I rest my fingers on the keyboard and then just press the one that I want harder. I also rely on the "feel" of the key under my fingers to determine if I am actually hitting in the middle of the keys or if I need to shift my hands around just a little.
On a touch screen, resting your fingers on the keyboard is called "pressing several keys at the same time" and is bad. So, to actually "type" with a touch screen, you need to hover your fingers over the keyboard, which also means that your fingers can easily shift.
So, yeah, touch screens suck for typing.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."