Gadgetory

thanks to LastPass for sponsoring our coverage of Computex 2018 you can try LastPass for free at the link in the video description this is a hands-on that is so exclusive only a handful of people in the world have touched this device so far that we had to come all the way to a Seuss's headquarters in order to get it this is the one unit of what they're calling Project Precog which takes an idea that we've sort of seen before in the Lenovo yoga book which had a touchscreen on the top and then it had like a touch surface that you could use as a keyboard and touch pad on the bottom and takes it to a completely different level so it's kind of a notebook in the sense that like a two-in-one you could use it on the desk in front of you or in your lap in front of you or you could flip it around and use it just as a Windows tablet see that got that Start menu this thing actually does work by the way you guys or you could put it in tent mode but then it's also kind of just like a like a giant flexible touch surface and they've got a book mode that would allow you to use it as well I mean I guess this is sort of self-explanatory as as kind of a book one of the most striking things about the device to me is that they've achieved near symmetry in the design so the the top and the the bottom of the laptop as concepts are sort of being challenged here because check this out so this surface here like yes this Asus logo by the way none of this stuff is final this is all very much in engineering stages right now so this Asus logo here is is right-side up if you hold it this way but then you flip it over to the other side and you could just as easily have that logo here or here there's no feet there's no nothing you could literally put it down this way open it up and there's absolutely no reason why the keyboard and touchpad couldn't just be on side and that's actually a big part of where the name of this product Precog comes from asus knows that with great flexibility you can actually lose some of the intuitiveness of the device and they're talking about some of the ways that they plan to tackle this so for example they want the finished product to be able to detect when its keyboard is moved near it so that the on-screen keyboard could go away and the same would go for something like a mouse this is just a regular off-the-shelf mouse but the example that they're talking about it's like oh well maybe when you move the mouse here now the touchpad that is like sort of a virtual touchpad on the bottom screen can go away and maybe when that moves so you can take more advantage of all this screen real estate that you paid for the keyboard itself could also move which I guess brings us to the other challenge that a seuss seems to be well aware of and yet I still have my doubts about how they're going to solve how do you make a keyboard usable on a touchscreen how do you make a keyboard experience that runs as an as an as an image on a touchscreen even remotely usable there are a couple of main issues here that quite frankly the solutions i've seen for so far are not even close to adequate so first of all is haptic feedback when you press down on a key on a keyboard the the response in your hands and your fingertips needs to be instantaneous and I have never experienced a haptic motor that is fast enough or crisp enough that I would consider it to be acceptable as a replacement for a real keyboard and then the other one is the positioning so when I sit down at my laptop the first thing that I do is run my fingers over top of it and find the bumps for the home row that's how within you know a second or two I can be typing at full speed asus has actually shared with me some of the ideas they have for tackling these problems and I have to say that my initial impressions of the idea were much worse than they are now but there's still a lot of work to be done and they're not expecting any kind of real product based on this concept to be available until sometime in 2019 with that said there's still a lot that we can try to guess that based on what we're seeing so far so in spite of the thermal challenges because you got to remember most laptops breathe either through the bottom which this one won't have a bottom because both of them are the top the hinge or the keyboard or some combination of the two it will have to be basically passive but they're still saying that they might expect to be able to put core i7 grade Hardware in it let's hope him tells next generation has fantastic thermal and power consumption properties we can also look at the i/o so right now we've got a couple of Thunderbolt three ports which I am actually shocked to see in a form factor like this either of which can be used for charging based on our short hands-on time with the product another thing that we know is that the top and bottom have only slight differences in thickness so you can see it's just the thickness of the glass right here that is allowing them to put processor memory storage battery somehow they've managed to jam a battery in this thing are we going to see some kind of a custom shaped battery technology powering it are we gonna maybe see them split up the battery Apple actually did that in the iPhone 10 where they put part of the battery in one portion of the phone and part of it elsewhere could we see something where they put some battery here and some there something I'm really curious to see what they do with is speakers so right now you can actually see that's probably part of the reason why we've got some extra thickness on the bottom but we actually saw Sony demo a TV as CES 2017 that had the speaker's built into the panel of the glass so it actually produced sound by vibrating the glass and it sounded shockingly good I mean well I would love to see that technology built into something like this but while that all sounded really positive and excited there are still a lot of challenges for them to overcome like right now do you think Windows 10 is ready for this kind of an interface hardly I mean even something as simple as taking this chat window that's running in there demo and dragging it with your finger up to the oh wait there's a hinge there so they might need some kind of momentum based software solution for flinging windows from one screen on to the other so there's a lot of software work still to be done here but again I really wish I could tell you guys more about how they're planning to solve the keyboard problem I'm pretty hopeful and I want to hear from you is this kind of a device important is this something that you guys want to see let me know in the comments below and let me know what you think are the biggest challenge and the biggest benefit to a device like this that's it's more screen now than laptop you know folded and you know not evil but but definitely bad you know like in that way speaking of bad it would be bad if you guys didn't check out our sponsor here at Computex 2018 LastPass with LastPass all your passwords can be stored conveniently in your vault where they can be accessed on any device from anywhere in the world and even shared with people this is something that has come in handy for me a lot of times while I've been traveling and LastPass stores more than just passwords you could store your passport number so that you can quickly jot that into the website when you're trying to check in for a flight for example it can store your social security number or your children's care card numbers so you don't have to carry around cards that are not only expensive to replace but also a huge potential problem if they get into the hands of narrow do wells or even things like credit card numbers for something like the the business credit card that you would never actually carry around but you might have to use from time to time so track out past you can try it out for free we're gonna have a link in the video description so thanks for watching guys I hope you enjoyed what will probably be the last video we upload from Computex 2018 we certainly saved the best for last here and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any of our videos on Linus tech tips I'm shocked at how thin they managed to make this thing in spite of two touchscreens