Thursday, August 1, 2013

Living with Windows 8 and Lenovo Ideapad Yoga: Part 1

About two weeks ago, I killed my faithful Toshiba M205-S4806. Rest in peace my friend, you worked hard for 5 years and deserve the rest (and died only because I fried your motherboard by performing "open heart surgery" on you on the carpet. Mea maxima culpa) . Well, that brought me in the market for a new machine. And this time, I had a choice: go for a Mac Book Air, or stay in the Windows camp with one of its competitors: an Ultrabook.

Truth be told, I liked the Toshiba a lot. Even though it ran Vista. I know Vista was panned by the larger audience while Windows 7 was loved. I personally, never had too much trouble getting to use Vista (including the UAC! I actually enforced it in my home by creating separate Administrator and "normal" user accounts, to good effect). And I never found too much of a difference between Vista and Windows 7 (to me they were practically the same OS, with different marketing and perceptions. Vide: Project Mojave). Anyhow, I liked the Toshiba because it was a solidly built machine, with a no non-sense touchpad, and a well laid out keyboard. I particularly liked the keyboard lay-out because the keys were nice and big, had enough travel for tactile feedback, yet quiet enough to type in bed without waking up the one sleeping next to you. It also had a neat column of home, page up, page down and end keys making it easy to find these and control the cursor without the use of the mouse. I also liked how the keypad was arranged so that it didn't accidentally move the cursor when your palm brushed against it (actually the layout entirely prevented that possibility).

Compare that with the build of the latest crop of Windows Ultrabooks: they all look like Mac wannabes, with large touchpads and baffling keyboards (particularly the models from Asus, Acer, Samsung and Sony). I wouldn't mind the large touchpads personally, but what ever their arrangement, they go berserk at the slightest brush of your palm on the touchpad. Mac machines don't seem to suffer from this at all!

For the record, I find the Mac keyboard weird because of its refusal to provide the quick navigation keys (home, page up, page down and end). Some Windows machines (Acer, Sony) take another baffling approach in their attempts to ape the Mac: requiring you to press the function key in addition with miniaturized arrow keys to move the cursor around. This is "non-standard" at best. I realize there never really was any standard on the keyboard layouts, but the de facto layout with Windows (and Linux) keyboards was radically different and a I'm sure large majority of PC users are unfamiliar with this new layout.

I'm not sure where the impetus to mindlessly ape a competitors product comes from, but I do know that it comes at the expense of familiarity and, consequently, productivity. And productivity has been the strong suite of Windows machines against the Mac for the longest time.

One might question as to why I'm drawn to the Ultrabooks? Why not focus on the many many cheaper models for a functional, value oriented laptop?

Honestly, if the lower priced models were any good, I'd jump at the opportunity. However, from what I've seen from nearly a month of online and in-store browsing, most of the cheaper models tend to sport 15" or 17" screens (are the overcompensating for something?). These are too large and unwieldy for my liking, particularly because they choose to mess up the keyboard by including the additional number pad. I understand that might be a plus to some, but it doesn't work for me in a laptop form factor. I have my desktop for that, thank you.

It seems the Windows market is facing tectonic shifts of sorts. There already was secular shift towards mobile computing (laptops, netbooks gaining market share at the expense of the aging desktop). However, there also seems to be a schism in the laptop market now: one set seems to focus on the ultra price-conscious but non-tech savvy low margin, high volume segment, while another seems to be going at the high price, feature rich, higher margin market. 

The low end of the market is ostensibly threatened by the tablet form factor. However, there is still a need for a productivity option in this segment. Yet, due to the tablet threat, if volumes are to remain the same, there must be severe pressure on the margins (and manifestly, there is).

The high end is competing head-on with the likes of the Mac Air. While productivity focused individuals will always be drawn to a Windows machine ("Excel just doesn't feel the same!"), there is a strong desire in this segment to not be one-upped by a Mac in appearance. Hence, the germination of products like Toshiba's Kira lineup. This means that the middle ground of value conscious, feature rich, productivity focused laptops seems to be drying up (much like the middle class?).

Kudos the to the Lenovo Ideapad Yoga for bringing a useful set of features in a very usable package: the keyboard is sane (island style keys with ample travel, no backlight but that's ok; neat column of home, page up, page down, end keys), nice 1600x900 touch screen, impressive black overall color scheme. My specimen sports a snappy 128GB SSD, but no DVD/CD drive. There is also an SD card reader, an HDMI port and two USB ports (the one on the left is a charge-when-closed USB 3.0 port).

But the coup de grace is clearly the double hinge that allows it to go from laptop to tablet in a flash! I went ahead and spent another $30 getting myself the Lenovo keyboard sleeve that protects the keyboard in the non-laptop modes ("tent", "stand", and "tablet").

All this, and I haven't even gotten to using the OS itself!

Windows 8 has oodles of potential! The start screen is beautiful, the icons are eye-catching, the Metro apps are absolutely gorgeous to look at. And on the 1600x900 screen of the Lenovo Ideapad Yoga, they really, really come alive. I love the look and feel of the Xbox music app, especially when it's playing songs with artist pictures: the show of those images is outright captivating! The Yoga is by far the most innovative Ultrabook I've come across: it allows you to go from laptop to tablet in seconds. It is guaranteed to ace the "amaze the wife" test!

And yet, there are instances where a power user such as myself is left scratching his head.


Initial interactions with the device and OS bring several questions to mind:
"What are all the gestures that work with this device?" And, "where are the hot target areas, you know like the 'Charms bar' that has quick access to search, the 'Start' menu and settings?"

None of these are easily answered by self-discovery.

There is a quick tutorial when you setup your machine, but it only talks about bringing up the Charms bar, and that too only the one time during setup. There are no subsequent visual cues to prompt the user to look at a particular edge of the screen.

Following is a list of the actions I've discovered so far. I'm sure there are pages and pages out there written about this, but I'm listing these to show that in a week's worth of owning this device this is all I've discovered so far. And mind you, I'm not a tech ingĂ©nue.

NOTE: "Swipe" below means "contact the screen with one finger and while maintaining contact move the finger" in a particular direction. Where more than one digits are required, the number of fingers will be mentioned (e.g. "two finger scroll")

  • Summoning the Charms bar: starting at the right edge of the screen, swipe right to left
  • Clock and battery indicator: when the Charms bar is summoned, this appears on the lower left corner of the screen
  • Switching between open applications: from the left edge of the screen, slowly swipe left to right to bring in the "next" application. I'll explain "next" shortly.
  • Task list or list of open apps: starting from the left edge of the screen, slowly swipe left to right to start bringing in the next application, but instead of going towards the middle of the screen as above, reverse going right to left back to where you started from. When you reach the right edge, a column appears with all open apps. You'll also find the "Start" screen at the bottom of this column.
  • Screen splitting: starting from the left edge of the screen, slowly swipe left to right to start bringing in the next application. Instead of letting go, hold it and a separator appears. Initially, it snaps to the left third of the screen. If you let go, that's what your app will occupy. If you drag the app all the way to the right, then it'll instead occupy the right third of the screen. Once the screen is split, the separator sports a "handle" (looks like a vertical ellipsis) that can be dragged to switch the ratio of screen real-estate between the two apps. Screen splitting is limited to these two orientations: left third, or right third. Also note that this is different from the Windows 7 "Desktop" screen tiling where you can snap one application to half the screen by dragging it to the top of the left or right half of the screen. You can still do that with "Desktop" apps in the "Desktop"
  •  (At this point, if you're asking what's the "Desktop"? Well, the "Desktop" is what one normally sees when one logs into Windows 7. "Metro" is the new Windows 8 colorful live-tile "Start screen".)
  • App context menus: short swipe from the bottom of the screen towards the center; alternatively, short swipe from the top of the screen to the middle
  • Killing a Metro app: starting at the top edge of the screen, swipe towards the middle of the screen and keep touching the screen. the app window will shrink and float with your finger. Move this to the bottom edge of the screen. The window disappear as the app is closed. This was by far the most non-intuitive action that I discovered only through sheer serendipity.
  • Pinch zoom: this action is most used in Internet Explorer, and one that is most natural and familiar to users, especially coming from a smart phone.
  • Page back/ forward: Swipe right / left. This is most used in the Metro Internet Explorer app. Also to be found in book reading apps such as the Amazon Kindle app
  • One finger scroll: Swipe up or down using one finger on the screen to move a list up or down. Anyone who's used the current crop of smartphones should find this very familiar.
  • Two finger scroll: Using two fingers, swipe vertically on the touchpad (not the screen) to move the page. The direction and sensitivity of scroll can be controlled by the Synaptics TouchPad driver. This is probably most familiar to Mac users

Agreed, some of the above gestures are quite natural, and especially so to a generation familiar with modern smartphones. However, some gestures, such as the one to close a Metro app, are rather difficult to discover and execute without any visual cues or hints.

I'm inclined to think that many of these gestures would fail the "wife test" or the "grandmother test". Contrast this with the iPad / iPhone gesture set which not only excel at the "wife/grandmother" test, but epitomize the "toddler test", and actually serve to democratize computing. Windows 8 seems to score a D- here instead, despite oodles of potential; like an autistic or dyslexic math-genius struggling with spelling.

Part 1 conclusion:
Windows 8 looks beautiful, Lenovo Ideapad Yoga is by far the most promising, feature rich, value oriented convertible Ultrabook in the market now. The combination still needs some more work: Windows 8 with its schizophrenic, dissociative identity disorder, and the Lenovo hardware with its touch pad and keyboard quirks.

Part 2 will be about using productivity apps such as Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook) on this device running Windows 8

 

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