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

You want courage? THIS is courage!

[LynnwoodRooster]

Why get a puny little "touch bar" when you can have a full-on "touch board"?

COURAGE!

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.

Re:Typing on a flat surface...

[blindseer]

Voice could possibly come close to the speed if it could get the accuracy up.

That won't happen until we get some kind of standard on spelling vs. pronunciation. Here's an example...
I was listening to some music on my Sirius radio and heard a song I liked. I made note of the artist on the radio display, Gina Clowes. How is that pronounced? I have no idea. Does that rhyme with "house", "hose", or "haws"? I made my best guess on the pronunciation and said to my Echo, "Alexa, play music by Gina Clowes," and hoped for the best. The response was something like, "I can't find music by jean clothes". That's like hearing the double translation from English to Chinese and back again, and probably not far from what is actually happening in the software.

I found out that spelling bees are quite unique to the English speaking world. That's because English has "borrowed" so much from other languages that the rules on spelling is that there are none. Spelling anything but the most trivial of words is only by memorization. We can pronounce them and spell them but without a lot of context the two rarely correlate. It takes a lot of brain power to figure this out and we don't think much of it. Getting a human to keep this straight is hard enough, and getting computer to figure this out any time soon will be nearly impossible.

There's people out there trained in the art of transcribing on special keyboards made specifically for this purpose. They can type 200 words per minute, which is a bit faster than typical speaking. They do this by not spelling words but by phonetics. Turning that into precise written English language still requires interpretation from context. Using such a keyboard for things like writing computer code would be, I can imagine, quite difficult.

Noone is in love with the keyboard but it's the best we have currently.

There we can agree.

Re:Typing on a flat surface...

[cyn1c77]

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.

The primary reason we use a keyboard is because we use an alphabet. The alphabet serves as a major constraint in keyboard design, so you would need to address that you make any crazy changes. But that isn't really the issue...

We don't write with our fingers in the sand (or equivalent) for a reason. It is less efficient and more uncomfortable than current technologies. Try it on a touchscreen program that recognizes your handwriting. You will write incredibly slowly, messily, and you will hurt yourself after a month from overuse.

People are definitely willing to evolve, the new technology just needs to be better than the current one.

Scratching things on rocks sucked. Quills were better. But not as good as pens, because sharpening your quill and dipping it every three words is a pain in the ass when you're in a hurry. Fountain pens were great, but finicky and travel poorly. Ballpoint were much more robust, but with a slightly deficient writing experience (no line variation and have to press hard reducing writing quality). Rollerballs require less pressure.

We similarly went from typewriters to keyboards. And have been reducing the keyboard key press distance and feel for the last several years.

The key thing that most designers miss is that you actually need SOME feedback when you are writing or typing. If the pen is too slippery on the paper, or the keypress is too short (or nonexistent for a touchscreen), you lose track of things. "Did I press the key? Or just skim it? Did I hit the meta escape key or the F1 touch area? Did my pen run out of ink or did I miss the paper? Oh shit, I missed the paper and am writing on the table!"

Touchscreens let us type incredibly fast, but also wildly inaccurately and with no feeling. There's nothing wrote with touchscreen keys, but the existing designs are primitive. Put a touchscreen ON the key of a real keyboard. Let me control how high the key sits and how far I want to depress it for it to function. Keys need to actually have edges that you can feel for touch typing.

All of those features are standard on aftermarket keyboards for enthusiasts and professionals. They are the direction that the touchscreen technology needs to evolve. I currently feel that touchscreen keyboards are at the ballpoint pen level: They get the job done and are convenient, but are inaccurate, uncomfortable and provide no feedback.

They beat Apple to the punch

[mschaffer]

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

Can't wait

[batukhan]

I'm more interested in the display. Can't wait for cheap spare parts. Until now the largest e-ink display you could get was from a 13" $700 Sony e-reader. Or settle for a 6" $50 Kindle