Logitech – frans goes blog

All-in-one: still not there

HP-elite-x2 — *HP Elite X2 1012 press photo (image © HP)*.

Some time ago, I blogged about tablets as productivity devices, and then I also have written about some early experiences as a user of Microsoft Surface Pro 4: a Windows 10, 2-in-one tablet PC that relies on combination of touch screen, pen computing, and keyboard and touchpad cover (plus Cortana voice assistant, if you are a US/English user). It just might be that I am restless and curious by nature, but these days I find myself jumping from Microsoft to Apple to Google ecosystems, and not really finding what I am looking for from any of them.

When I am using an iOS or Android tablet, the file management is usually a mess, external keyboard and mouse inputs are not working reliably, and multitasking between several apps and services, copy-pasting or otherwise sharing information between them all is a pain.

When I am on a regular Windows laptop or PC, keyboard and mouse/touchpad usually are just fine, and file management, multitasking and copy-pasting work fine. Touch screen inputs and the ease of use lag behind tablet systems, though. (This is true also to the Apple OS X desktop environment, but I have pretty much given up the use of Macs for my work these days, I just could not configure the system to work and behave in the ways I want – as a Microsoft OS/PC user who has hacked his way around DOS, then Windows 3.0 etc., and thus has certain things pretty much “hard-wired” in the way I work.)

Surface Pro 4 is the most optimal, almost “all-in-one” system I have found so far, but I have started to increasingly dislike its keyboard cover. Surface Pro 4 cover is not that bad, but if you are a touch-typist, it is not perfect. There is still slight flex in the plastic construction and shallow key movement that turns me off, and produces typing errors exactly when you are in a hurry and you’d need to type fast. I am currently trying to find a way to get rid of the type cover, and instead use my favorite, Logitech K810 instead. But: I am not able to attach it to Surface Pro in solid enough way, and there is no touchpad in K810, so workflow with all those mouse right-clicks becomes rather complex.

I really like the simplicity of Chromebooks, and this blog note, for example, is written with my trusty Toshiba Chromebook 2, which has excellent, solid keyboard (though not backlighted), and a good, crisp Full HD IPS screen plus a responsive, large touchpad. However, I keep reaching out and trying to scroll the screen, which is not a touch version. (Asus Chromebook Flip would be one with a touch screen.) And there is nothing comparable to the Surface Pen, which is truly useful when one e.g. reads and makes notes to a pile of student papers in PDF/electronic formats. Also, file management in a Chrome OS is a mess, and web versions of popular apps still respond more slowly and are more limited than real desktop versions.

So, I keep on looking. Recently I tested the HP Elite X2 1012 (pictured), which is pretty identical to the Surface Pro systems that Microsoft produces, but has an excellent, metallic and solid keyboard cover, as well as other productivity oriented enhancements like the optional 4G/LTE sim card slot, USB C port with Thunderbolt technology, and a decent enough screen, pen and kickstand design. However, Elite X2 falls short in using less powerful Intel Core M series processors (Surface Pro 4 goes for regular Core i5 or i7 after the entry-level model), by being rather expensive, and according to the reviews I have read, also the battery life of Elite X2 is not something a real mobile office worker would prefere.

Maybe I can find a way to connect the Elite X2 metallic keyboard cover to the Surface Pro 4? Or maybe not.

(Edit: The battery life of Elite X2 actually appears to be good; the screen on the other hand only so-and-so.)

Tablets as productivity devices

Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard for iPad Air

Professionally, I have a sort of on-off relationship with tablets (iPads, Android tablets, mainly, but I count also touch-screen small-size factor Windows 2-in-1’s in this category). As small and light, tablets are a natural solution when you have piles of papers and books in your bag, and want to travel light. There are so many things that every now and then I try to make and do with a tablet – only to clash again against some of the limitations of them: the inability to edit some particular file quickly in the native format, inability to simply copy and paste data between documents that are open in different applications, limitations of multitasking. Inability to quickly start that PC game that you are writing about, or re-run that SPSS analysis we urgently need for that paper we are working on.

But when you know what those limitations are, tablets are just great for those remaining 80 % or so of the stuff that we do in mobile office slash research sort of work. And there are actually features of tablets that may make them even stronger as productivity oriented devices than personal computers or fully powered laptops can be. There is the small, elite class of thin, light and very powerful laptop computers with touch screens (running Windows 10) which probably can be configured to be “best of both worlds”, but otherwise – a tablet with high dpi screen, fast enough processor (for those mobile-optimized apps) and excellent battery life simply flies above using a crappy, under-powered and heavy laptop or office PC from the last decade. The user experience is just so much better: everything reacts immediately, looks beautiful, runs for hours, and behaves gracefully. Particularly in iOS / Apple ecosystem this is true (Android can be a bit more bumpy ride), as the careful quality control and fierce competition in the iOS app space takes care that only those applications that are designed with the near-perfect balance of functionality and aesthetics get into the prime limelight. Compare that to the typical messy interfaces and menu jungles of traditional computer productivity software, and you’ll see what I mean.

The primary challenge of tablets for me is the text entry. I can happily surf, read, game, and watch video content of various kinds in a tablet, but when it comes to making those fast notes in a meeting where you need to have two or three background documents open at the same time, copy text or images from them, plus some links or other materials from the Internet, the limitations of tablets do tend to surface. (Accidentally, Surface 4 Pro or Surface Book by Microsoft would be solutions that I’d love to test some of these days – just in case someone from MS sales department happens to read this blog…) But there are ways to go around some of these limitations, using a combination of cloud services running in browser windows and dedicated apps and quickly rotating between them, so that the mobile operating system does not kill them and lose the important data view in the background. Also, having a full keyboard connected with the tablet device is a good solution for that day of work with a tablet. iPad Air with a premium wireless keyboard like Logitech K811 is shoulders above the situation where one is forced to slowly tap in individual letters with the standard virtual keyboard of a mobile device. (I am a touch-typist, which may explain my perspective here.)

In the future, it is increasingly likely that the differences between personal computers and mobile devices continues to erode and vanish. The high standards of ease of use, and user experience more generally, set by mobile device already influence the ways in which also computer software is being (re-)designed. The challenges waiting there are not trivial, though: when a powerful, professional tool is suddenly reduced into a “toy version” of itself, in the name of usability, the power users will cry foul. There are probably few lessons in the area of game (interface) design that can inform also the design of utility software, as the different “difficulty levels” or novice/standard/expert modes are being fine-tuned, or the lessons from tutorials of various kinds, and adaptive challenge levels or information density is being balanced.

Gestures and multi-touch: Logitech T650

As operating systems evolve, so do the ways of interacting with them. While older laptops might have still the processing power or even the disk space to run e.g. Win8 or Win10, it is often in the control, or human interface hardware where the support is lacking. Adding an external keyboard and touchpad might be a way to give some extra life to an older system, while the downside of such “hybrid system” will unavoidably be that you’ll lose the simplicity of being able to just open the laptop cover and quickly start working. Setting up the external keyboard and external touchpad might make nevertheless sense for longer working sessions. In my case, I suffer from chronic carpal tunnel syndrome and simply cannot work with non-ergonomic mouses, keyboards or touchpads – and I regularly rotate and try all sorts of mouse replacements and other add-ons.

My optimal system at the moment is based on some very nice gear Logitech has developed. Both on my Macbook Pro and Vaio Z3 I have now set up the illuminated bluetooth keyboard by Logitech: K810 model for Vaio, K811 for Mac. The key travel in either of these, otherwise pretty excellent PCs is just too shallow to allow for high-speed typing – at least for me, your mileage may vary. Logitech K810/K811 is so excellent piece of design and engineering, with such an outstanding typing experience, that I just cannot stop marvelling at it every day I use these things – and I have purchased several, despite the rather steep price. My lurking nightmare is that Logitech will some day cancel this product, or somehow alter and ruin the design and functionality – so I just might again go out and get a couple extra ones to my spare parts closet, just to be on the safe side.

While I really like the touchpads of Macbooks, the touch behaviour in Windows systems has been much more problematic. In modern Windows 10 systems the touchpads apparently are getting closer to the Mac standard, and there is also the additional interaction affordance of touch screen in many Win10 models (something that Apple has stayed away in their laptops, while the touch interface of iPads and iPhones is of course very good). I happen to like the combination of touch screen and mouse/touchpad – it feels natural to handle screen directly, and it is also good for ergonomics to change the manner of manipulation every now and then – even while if touch screen would be the only mouse replacement, it would not really work.

For older Windows 7 devices like my Vaio Z3 there is no luxury of truly working multitouch gestures or anything like that – the touchpad in this Vaio is small, cramped and operates so erratically that it can pretty much drive you crazy, particularly if you have used something like Macbook Pro, with a really good touchpad and multigesture OS X that supports it.

While originally purchased for my other, Windows 8.1 equipped home computer, I recently took the Logitech T650 external touchpad to work and tried setting it up with my Vaio. While the small “Unifying” connector now takes up one precious USB port (no bluetooth in T650), I was surprised how well this Logitech touchpad works with Windows 7. The newest version of Logitech’s SetPoint software works really well also under Windows 7, and the two-finger, three-finger and even four-finger gestures really transform the speed and ease of use for scrolling and handling many documents and different software running simultaneously in my Vaio. The operating system is originally not really optimised for this kind of use, and there is no e.g. “expose” style overview mode in Win7, but Logitech add-on software provides that feature, as well as several others. The main problem is that if you are constantly running from meeting room to another like I do, there is not really time to set up the laptop, set up the keyboard and touchpad, switch on all of them, make sure that they connect correctly (sometimes they do not – a reboot might be required); and then, at the end of meeting to switch off and repack all three things again – just to repeat everything at the next room. But I guess I’ll just need to live with that at the moment. The multitouch gestures and solid typing experience that Logitech provides are so much better than the alternatives.