The real magic, though, is the lower 10.8-inch full HD E Ink display that also doubles as a keyboard or notepad. That keyboard can change between keyboard layouts on the fly to accommodate different regions and languages.
To address the virtual-ness, Lenovo has the buttons slightly shift when typing to simulate movement. When combined with haptic feedback (vibration) and audio cues (both of which are configurable), typing on the Yoga Book is much better than the previous Halo Keyboard. While it is not nearly as good as a “real” typing experience, it is getting closer.
Another neat feature is the trackpad. The virtual one appears when you tap the dot below the spacebar, giving you a decently large target for moving the cursor. To save space, however, that trackpad goes away when you start to type and turns back into a spacebar.
Daniel Rubino
That’s a very interesting innovation, one I hope to see in more portable devices in the future. Having a ‘virtual’ keyboard that can adapt to different languages is very useful to people working in multi-lingual environments. While you can currently change keyboard layouts in Windows, this (obviously) cannot update the actual keys in front of you, so you still need to remember where each key goes in the secondary layouts. It’s especially difficult with special characters, as each language has its own ideas where various symbols should go, and which are important enough to be featured on hardware keys. An e-ink keyboard would make this so much easier!
And hopefully at some point in the future Amazon will get around to releasing an UWP Kindle app, so that we may use the secondary display as e-book reader as well!
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