Lenovo's Yoga Book C930 Laptop Swaps the Keyboard For an E Ink Display (techcrunch.com)

Lenovo has launched a laptop with an e-ink display in place of a normal keyboard. An anonymous reader writes: The Yoga Book C930 laptop follows in the footsteps of the Yoga Book A12, the convertible that was all the rage at IFA back in 2016. That device swapped the standard keyboard for a touchscreen, so the surface could double as a drawing pad. It wasn't particularly conducive for typing, but it certainly was innovative. The C930 takes things even further, swapping the Halo keyboard for E Ink. It's an interesting application for the technology, which has largely been relegated to the world of e-readers. The secondary display serves the same function as on the A12, doing triple duty as a keyboard, notepad and e-reader. The C930 will be available in October, starting at $1,000.

Comments

Typing on a flat surface...

[OpenSourced]

Typing on a flat surface is something that certainly takes some getting used to.

I wonder up to what point are we slaves of custom. I mean, if we had moved directly from handwriting to touchscreens, without the middle steps of the typewriter and keyboard, what would the input methods be like?

Perhaps a type of shorthand, written with a stylus. Or circles of different sizes depending on the frequency of each letter. Or mixes of finger movements and finger positions...

I feel that we are constrained by the keyboard. That we have adapted to it, more than it to us. I suppose that nowadays more words are written in flat screens than in any other system. It's time to end the dictatorship of the keyboard.

Re:Typing on a flat surface...

[NormalVisual]

Perhaps a type of shorthand, written with a stylus

This was already tried and wasn't particularly successful with Palm's Graffiti and other earlier handwriting systems. Probably the fastest available entry device (short of some kind of imaginary telepathic device) would be a stenotype keyboard (good stenographers can average between 6-7 words per second), but the learning curve for those is rather steep. Gregg shorthand allows a skilled scribe to record text at comparable speeds with just a pen, but using a far more limited character set that's difficult to integrate into a lot of computing tasks. Other visually-driven systems like Dasher are quite efficient and especially suited for disabled users, but entry still isn't anywhere near as quick as a traditional keyboard.

Keyboards have become the dominant entry method not only because of history and commonality, but because we use our hands for so many things that the control loop between the brain and our hands becomes exceedingly refined over our lifetime. I'm not a particularly fast typist (about 80 wpm), but I don't really have to think at all about *what* I'm typing - the traditional keyboard does a good job of keeping your hands where they're supposed to be, and most touch typists get to the point where their hands more or less run on autopilot. This is even more so with a keyboard layout that attempts to optimize movement (like Dvorak). Chorded keyboards are more efficient still, but that's basically what a stenotype machine is. The more complex the key actions become, the closer data entry becomes akin to playing a piano, with the attendant difficulty.

They beat Apple to the punch

[mschaffer]

A laptop with a keyboard worse than the MacBook Pro.
Impressive.