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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 ASUS'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 touchpad 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 um 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 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 is absolutely no reason why the keyboard and touchpad
couldn't just be on this 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 is 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 the screen real estate that you paid for the
keyboard itself could also move which i
guess brings us to the other challenge that ASUS seems to be well aware of and
yet i still have uh my doubts about how
they're going to uh solve how do you
make a keyboard usable on a touchscreen
how do you make a keyboard experience that runs as 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 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 at 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 Intel's 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 3 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
custom shape battery technology powering it are we going to 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 at ces 2017
that had the speakers built into the panel of the glass so it actually
produced sound by vibrating the glass and it sounded shockingly good i mean
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 their 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 onto 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
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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 touch screens