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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 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, you 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 'top' and the 'bottom' of the laptop as concepts
are sort of being challenged here because
Check this out
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 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 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 it's like
maybe when you move the mouse here
Now the touchpad, that is like a virtual touchpad on the bottom screen, can go away
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 Asus 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
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. First of all is haptic feedback
When you press down on a key on a keyboard
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
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 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
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. 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. 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 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, 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 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 on to the other
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
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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
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I'm shocked at how thin they managed to make this thing in spite of two touchscreens