In short, and if you didn't know it already, Windows 8 without a touchscreen is tedious. The good news is, running Microsoft's new baby on purpose-built hardware isn't all that bad. Lenovo offers a choice of Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs with the IdeaPad Yoga 13 and I’ve the 1.9GHz Core i7-3517U model with 4GB RAM here. Its smaller 11in Windows RT companion, the Yoga 11 is an ARM-based alternative and can perform the same bendy tricks but has limited software options.The thinking behind the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga is to offer flexibility without complexity. Take a look at Dell's XPS 12 flip and spin affair or Sony's Vaio Duo deckchair and you have oddly constructed contraptions designed to position the screen on top of the keyboard and give the impression of a tablet. Lenovo does have the ThinkPad Twist to bring to the party but its approach with the IdeaPad Yoga 13 is refreshing for its elegance and simplicity.With the Yoga, you can still have a tablet, but the back of it will be the keyboard, which is inactive in this fold over configuration and a virtual on-screen alternative is available. Whether that exposure becomes a problem remains to be seen, but Lenovo has form when it comes to making keyboards that can survive daily hazards, although the AccuType keys here aren't the spill resistant sort found on the company’s ThinkPad laptops.
At 17mm thick, the IdeaPad Yoga 13 is certainly slim but lacks any major MacBook Air-style body tapering to make it appear skinnier still. Its robust metallic shell has a classy sheen and lends a hardback book appearance to the recessed black rubberised edges. Due to the screen's gymnastics, you can't open it with one hand while it sits on a desk. The hinges are too stiff and so prising it apart is a two-handed affair revealing a black keyboard and a "leather feel" palm rest surface. It looks pretty good as it doesn't seem to suffer from oily fingerprints and avoids an icy chill of metal or the sweaty slip of plastic.The keyboard layout is a little cramped and was the main complaint of most that tried it. You can adjust with a little practice but I was forever typing into the line above as I mistakenly hit the Up arrow key instead of the right side shift key. That said, the action is quite superb and the centred trackpad is a boon for us left handers, as I repeatedly perform right clicks unintentionally with offset trackpads. I can forgive the slightly skewed spacebar here, as there's enough of it to find easily.
The 10 x 7cm trackpad utilises a Synaptics ClickPad control panel that enables a variety of gestures from pinch-to-zoom to two finger right clicking and scrolling. Rather than having to reach for the touchscreen, you'll find swipes from different edges will perform typical Metro tasks, so you can toggle between the two most recently used applications; open the Charms bar and reveal/hide the Applications bar. The front edge of the trackpad is reserved for the usual left/right click functions.Quotw The week's chatter has provided fewer gems than usual and a lot more "Look at this great new product I launched at CES", but luckily you can always rely on Linus Torvalds to come out with a zinger.The Linux kernel developer pulled no punches when Red Hat's Mauro Carvalho Chehab tried to pass off a bug in the kernel as something at fault with PulseAudio and other third-party applications. That was a position with which Torvalds was clearly at odds, and he proceeded to express his concern with this carefully worded statement:It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you *still* haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?
If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?Meanwhile, Nokia chief Stephen Elop put his foot in it this week. The Finnish firm's CEO seemed to hint to Spanish newspaper El Pais that there might be room for a certain little green bot in the mobile-maker's future, or at least that Microsoft shouldn't take its relationship with Nokia for granted:In the current ecosystem wars, we are using Windows Phone as our weapon. But we are always thinking about what's coming next, what will be the role of HTML 5, Android... Today we are committed and satisfied with Microsoft, but anything is possible.But Nokia was quick to hustle its PR folks into action and quickly stated that of course Android wasn't going to be the new operating system for its mobes. Well, not exactly - let's just say it covered all its bases... The firm said:[Elop's comments were] mistranslated... leading to some erroneous reports and speculation about our strategic direction.
In the UK, entrepreneur James Dyson was lambasting the UK government for being more interested in passing trends than "tangible technology". The vacuum-cleaner and heater designer said:The government must do more to attract the brightest and best into engineering and science so that we can compete internationally. 26 per cent of engineering graduates do not go into engineering or technical professions.More worrying is that 85 per cent of all engineering and science postgraduates in our universities come from outside the UK. Yet nine in 10 leave the UK after they finish their studies. British knowledge is simply taken abroad.Engineering postgraduates need to be encouraged with generous salaries. A salary of £7,000 a year for postgraduate research is insulting.I am concerned that we are sometimes distracted by the glamour of web fads and video gaming rather than the development of tangible technology that we can export. There seems to be an obsession with Shoreditch’s so-called ‘Silicon roundabout’.
Meanwhile, the saga of John McAfee continues, as the IT security guru tells the world that during his time in Belize, he became a spymaster. As head spook of an extensive spy network, McAfee says he handed out hacked laptops to powerful people. He wrote in an blog post:I purchased 75 cheap laptop computers and, with trusted help, installed invisible keystroke logging software on all of them – the kind that calls home (to me) and disgorges the text files. It also, on command, turns on and off the microphone and camera – and sends these files on command.I had the computers re-packaged as if new. I began giving these away as presents to select people – government employees, police officers, cabinet minister’s assistants, girlfriends of powerful men, boyfriends of powerful women.I hired four trusted people full time to monitor the text files and provide myself with the subsequent passwords for everyone’s email, Facebook, private message boards and other passworded accounts. The keystroke monitoring continued after password collection, in order to document text input that would later be deleted. So nothing was missed…And finally, a Texan schoolgirl has lost her bid to stay at her school without wearing an ID badge. Andrea Hernandez refused to don the student tracking badge, which contains a RFID chip that tracks students, for both privacy and religious reasons, but a judge ruled that the school's offer to have her wear the tag without an RFID chip was a fair one.
Hernandez' family believes that the RFID tag represents the mark of the beast. Her father told the court in a letter:We firmly believe that it is our Hell Fire Belief that if we compromise our faith and religious freedom to allow you to track my daughter while she is at school it will condemn us to Hell. The only significant disappointment in the keyboard department is that it's not backlit. That said, if you really were having difficulty seeing it, there is always the touchscreen typing option. While the keys can remain fairly clean, the same can't be said of the 1600 x 900 resolution 13.3in IPS touchscreen.Admittedly, the Yoga 13 did the rounds of twentysomething nephews during the festivities and suffered some serious foodie fingering. The evidence has been hard to shift, as the grease just seems to smear from one corner of the screen to the next. As I type on it now, the grubby black margins of the display give a shoddy demeanour to an otherwise clean machine. It's like this snappy dresser ends up wearing an unironed shirt. Such is the lot of the touchscreen laptop user or 'convertible' I should say. The screen itself is bright, crisp albeit a bit on the shiny side, sticky mits notwithstanding.
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