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Lenovo’s new Yoga Book replaces the keyboard with an E Ink screen
- _carl_jung 8y agoI'd like to see a laptop with an e-ink display I can code on. That way I can go and sit in the sun.
- paulie_a 8y agoPersonally I wish the reflecting shiny screen would go away. Why in the world did that become standard?
- robin_reala 8y agoThat was always the promise of Pixel Qi screens. Shame they never hit critical mass. There are eink standalone monitors (e.g. http://dasungtech.com/ http://dasungtech.com/ ) but nothing in a laptop form factor that I’m aware of.
- dmos62 8y agoThe 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. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdRFMWff5CI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdRFMWff5CI
- hultner 8y agoWow 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.
- JansjoFromIkea 8y agoI 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)
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI really want some e-ink screen setup for a RPi but not sure how it will work.
- FullyFunctional 8y agoYou can get off the shelf for that easily, but the large modules are $450+$350 (https://shopkits.eink.com/product/concerto-driving-board https://shopkits.eink.com/product/concerto-driving-board) and not ideal for a mobile application.
- adrianN 8y agoI 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.
- joombaga 8y agoMy thoughts exactly. They replaced the keyboard. They should've replaced the display.
- simias 8y agoMy 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.
- hultner 8y agoSee 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17885138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17885138
- JansjoFromIkea 8y agoI 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.
- FullyFunctional 8y agoMy 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.
- johnchristopher 8y agoWell. 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.
- zaarn 8y agoAs 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...
- adrianN 8y agoIt's not cheap, but there are EInk displays that have low latency: https://youtu.be/i3wP-GSG1NY?t=242 https://youtu.be/i3wP-GSG1NY?t=242
- hultner 8y agoI'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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH0wAmMbFgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH0wAmMbFgI
- setr 8y agoeasy solution: an lcd screen for editing and a e-ink screen for reading 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
- amelius 8y agoI 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.
- dbingham 8y agoWhat about the Remarkable (https://remarkable.com/ 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.
- Seanny123 8y agoIt'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.
- LanceH 8y agoI read books with it and it's wonderful.
- Thimothy 8y agoThat is awfully wrong, it boots a custom linux-based OS, not Android. You are probably talking about other device (probably the yotaphone). http://remarkablewiki.com/tech/specs http://remarkablewiki.com/tech/specs I use the remarkable for taking notes on online courses, and works wonders.
- Seanny123 8y agoWhelp, they marketed it as Android and it had access to the Google Play store, so I thought it was Android... Seems I was wrong! I still maintain its very poor for reading papers I've found on my phone and then syncing the annotations.
- hultner 8y agoExactly what I was thinking when I saw this. I just want to attach a tmux/vi session to that EINK panel, I'll even bring my own wireless keyboard.
- ianai 8y agoSame here. I’m sure plenty want that, but apparently not enough.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoYep, 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).
- FullyFunctional 8y agoI 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
- devmunchies 8y agoWould you be losing syntax highlighting though?
- radus 8y ago> Would you be losing syntax highlighting though? Grayscale, italics, bold
- nathancahill 8y agoV A R I A B L E S
- chongli 8y agoThere are colour eink displays!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- s_kilk 8y agoHow is anyone supposed to type on something like that?
- maxerickson 8y agoWho cares. Bringing experiments all the way to market is a good thing, just don't buy one and you are sorted.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agobringing 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.
- maxerickson 8y agoOkay, 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.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoBringing 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.
- sofon 8y agoIt'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.
- laurentMiguel 8y agoI'm still consistently enraged at trackpads without physically distinct left and right buttons. No one does them right. Not even Apple.
- have_faith 8y agoI 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.
- madmulita 8y agoI've found trying to drag&drop with that method infuriating.
- eknkc 8y agoActivate 3 finger dragging in Accessibility settings. I use tap to click, two finger for right click and 3 finger for drag. Works great. I guess I never actually click the trackpad with these settings.
- edanm 8y agoThis 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.
- jacobush 8y agoIt's a bit non-discoverable. I think that is why. Agree though, I'd get crazy without it. (The behaviour of the touch, not the placement in the settings.)
- ianamartin 8y ago
- hackandtrip 8y agoE-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.
- protomyth 8y agoI 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.
- steve_adams_86 8y agoI 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.
- hackandtrip 8y agoI'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.
- jerrysievert 8y agoif 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. the hardware itself is pretty nice, though.
- mmjaa 8y agoI 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 ..
- Timpy 8y agoA MIDI keyboard interface would be great for music notation software, latency would be a non-factor
- darkerside 8y agoThis 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.
- dmos62 8y agoIt'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]. [0] https://youtu.be/fdRFMWff5CI?t=8m3s https://youtu.be/fdRFMWff5CI?t=8m3s
- CmdrKrool 8y ago"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.
- wilsonnb3 8y ago
- drej 8y agoI 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.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoI wonder if this is where Apple are going to end up with their touch bar. At least you won't need to worry about dust killing your keyboard.
- ianwalter 8y agoHah yea. Pressure sensitivity and haptic feedback on the touchbar to reduce accidental button presses would go a long way for me.
- jillesvangurp 8y agoThey 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.
- ianwalter 8y agoThe 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.
- mxuribe 8y agoI love the concept. I myself am a fan of physical, mechanical keyboards...but as a faux-tablet, I really am interested in this type of form factor.
- melling 8y ago“is still not as ergonomic as typing on a physical keyboard” Typing on a laptop keyboard usually isn’t considered ergonomic.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoSo, this would be completely awful, then.
- akegalj 8y agoYou 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)
- pentae 8y agoThis 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
- kjullien 8y agoBought 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.
- Casseres 8y agoI 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.
- api 8y agoMy 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.
- chaoticmass 8y agoApple has been on a mission to destroy all buttons, so this move wouldn't surprise me at all.
- intopieces 8y agoI am not a windows fan. Any guesses on Linux support? I’m guess none at all.
- siruncledrew 8y agoThere's a subsystem option for Linux on Windows 10: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
- FullyFunctional 8y agoThat is not the same thing and not something I'm interested in.
- afandian 8y agoI 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.
- ilaksh 8y agoThe new version has haptic feedback.
- afandian 8y agoYou 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.
- _nalply 8y agoWhat'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.
- harperlee 8y agoDIY 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.
- rjplatte 8y agoDare I say... Linux support?
- Tharkun 8y agoWith 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.
- Casseres 8y agoI 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.)
- hrcxxx 8y agoCan you easly switch between different keyboard layout e.g. latin, cyrilic, dvorak .etc. That would be a huge plus.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoI would think so, since I assume that Lenovo is selling it all over the world. I have been reading about APL and it would be cool to have the keyboard display all the special keys also...
- some_account 8y agoNext 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.
- orthecreedence 8y agoFinally we don't need a bios change to switch the fn and ctrl keys, right?
- social_quotient 8y agoUnrelated. 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.
- Monkeyget 8y agoI 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.