The Lenovo Yoga Book is a hinged tablet. Bottom half is a glass surface with both capacitive touch and Wacom digitiser. It comes with a Wacom pen, which has a swappable ballpoint pen nib so you can draw on paper and have it digitised. There's a backlit silkscreen-type stencil that shines through a (permanent) keyboard layout. And touchpad. So, it's touch-screen typing on a fixed keyboard layout. And you can swap between pen-digitiser and keyboard mode. A crazy set of features. I was very excited to buy it.
They keyboard is very hard to use. The pen is laggy and there's no really useful Android software. I use it exclusively for watching videos. Go figure.
Still, I'm glad they tried it. There's too much device monoculture IMHO.
Most products hit a point where the design space has been explored and there are only a few reasonable options. Outside of the recent touchbar and keyboard missteps apple picked up on the notion that people want laptops that are thin, and light with low bezel screens and big touchpads, a battery that works for the whole day and performance sufficient for huge numbers of tabs.
They've run with that design philosophy for a long time which has made their laptops hard to replace. I've been looking for a Linux laptop with similar specs to an mbp but it simply doesn't exist.
The bit about the swappable pen tip picked my interest, cool feature! As an avid believer that pen input is the most flexible way to express your thought process, I find it a bit of a lost art though, people born in the new millennium just wont spend the time to learn to write cursive. I went through most of the Note generation from Samsung and the SPen is getting really close to the look and feel of writing on paper. There's a Google hand writing keyboard for Android that is really good, in fact I am writing this using it.
Still, it looks like it will continue to be a niche functionality at best.
About 15 years ago during my studies I dreamt of a tablet device with pen input and hand writing recognition for advanced maths. I was writing a lot during my physics lectures but almost no plain text. I would still like to have such a device, but also with a CAS integrated with the handwriting recognition. This would take the pain out of typing stuff into a CAS using obscure syntax.
IMO iPad Pro with the appropriate software would be perfect. However, I think handwriting recognition for math might be too much a niche for developer to focus and polish into software that’s a pleasure to use.
And recognizing math is hard. That is a huge set of symbols (sometimes with semantically meaningful "tiny" variations like doubled up vertical lines on an R) and their size and relative positioning carries a lot of meaning. Handwriting is a walk in the park compared to that.
As someone with bad writing, I have very fond memories of the Graffiti input system from Palm. I can still remember the alphabet 20 years (it was painful writing that!) later.
Upon clicking that link: annoying survey popup, long loading times, chat with a Lenovo specialist modal on the side, not a great color scheme, buggy scrolling.
It baffles me that anyone would even attempt this, considering that a very similar technology -- not touchscreen keyboard, but with roughly similar properties -- has been tried in the 1980s, repeatedly, and has been, well, pretty much a failure for general-purpose computing.
(Edit: for confused readers, what we used to call a "membrane keyboard" looked like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Magnavox... . I.e. literally a membrane, with key outlines printed and nothing else. You'd press on the outlines which would go down, traveling no more than a few mm, a distance that was barely perceivable).
The ZX81 (Timex Sinclair 1000 in the US), the Magnavox Odissey, all had membrane keyboards and they were absolutely miserable. They weren't laggy or anything, it's just that the nearly complete absence of tactile feedback made them extremely annoying to use for any kind of productive purpose. They were beyond terrible and I can't imagine why anyone would want to go back to almost that. I say "almost" because membrane keyboards actually had a modicum of tactile feedback, and some manufacturers did eventually give in and produce membrane keyboards with some sort of tactile hints (e.g. embossed letter outlines). Touchscreens are even worse than that.
Membrane keyboards were ok (and still are) for things like limited consumer electronics controls and 16-key industrial touchpads (they're basically immune to liquids and dust). But they turned out to be useless for typing more than 20-30 characters at a time and they were abandoned save for a few niches.
But it's cheap. Had it been priced at 1500 USD, and had Windows 10 instead of Android - well, at very least the pen wouldn't be so laggy, and there would be software. And then, perhaps, there would be something akin to haptic feedback for the keyboard.
My point is: if Apple would ever attempt to do something like this the user experience would probably be out of the ballpark. And if it couldn't hit it - they wouldn't sell it.
See also: foldable phone craze.
Counterpoint: I hate the Touch Bar.
The machine is cool though. I have one and use it just for testing purposes. So the strange keyboard is a feature for me.
The thing is that the on-screen keyboard is far more preferable than the expensive Wacom stand.
I don't think it is bad as a spare power brick, plus the sound on it is pretty good. For pose value the TRON style keyboard works every time.
They keyboard is very hard to use. The pen is laggy and there's no really useful Android software. I use it exclusively for watching videos. Go figure.
Still, I'm glad they tried it. There's too much device monoculture IMHO.
https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/tablets/android-tablets/yoga-ta...