AirBar by Neonode - Add Touchscreen to 13.3" Windows 10 Notebooks

Excellent product

I had medium expectations for this. After a few minutes of finding out just how to use it, I am amazed. It works seamlessly as a touchscreen, with a few little caveats. It seems to have the least sensitivity/accuracy at the very top of the screen, which makes sense since the bar is located at the bottom and has to react to the top of the screen from a distance. If you are using a browser, move the screen a half inch down from the very top and you will have more accuracy. If you really like your iPad and wanted your MacBook Air to be more like it, this is the answer. Looks very professional also. I think there may be some folks who want it to do more than scroll, select tabs and basic stuff, so maybe this isn't for them. For me, though, it does what it says it will do.

I bought the MacBook Air version of the AirBar about a month ago. Overall it works as described. As others have said depending on what you are trying to click on it can be hard to determine where the mouse cursor is and get clicks exactly where you want them if the target is too small. Mounting was very easy and no real problem with the magnets. I run a very small dock bar at bottom of screen and it is hard to click the icons accurately with the AirBar not getting in the way. Out of the box the single click with one finger access worked without any driver installs. I do have to plug it in to a USB port before booting for it to be recognized. I did have problems with the multi-touch driver install. I run macOS 10.13 beta and the driver install is not fully compatible. The install says it finished successfully but then the driver fails to load properly, but I was able to move a few files around and get multitouch working. Airbar preference pane does not work though. I'm sure once 10.13 is released they will release a more compatible driver. So overall it is working but will have to use it longer to see how much I use it. It is nice to be able to interact with the screen since I am used to my iPad.

I could see this being useful for a small minority of people, who for some reason cannot use a mouse. For my purposes it is almost useless, because the pointing accuracy is so poor. IN fact, the accuracy is so bad that using e.g. the OS menus poses some risks: if you wanted to "sleep" the computer instead of "shut down" you are taking your chances. On my Mac OS those two commands in a pull down menu are right next to each other, and with using this AirBar, you might get one or the other command issued depending on how slowly and carefully you make your selection. I would estimate the pointing accuracy on screen is not much better than 10mm square. Plus, if you move your finger around, say to drag an object in the OS, or painting in artistic software, the TIME RESOLUTION is also not very good: your drag is registered in perhaps quarter second jumps.I installed the driver/extension for the airbar to get multi-finger gestures functionality. So I could use two finger gestures to e.g. scroll up and down or sideways to read a document easily. That seemed to work reasonably well. However, the resolution is so bad that you can't even use the AirBar to do online browsing, because all other actions - selecting URL links - are so unreliable. Unless you had the screen/browser set to show everything HUGE, which you might do if you had very bad eyesight. Maybe the AirBar could be useful to people with poor eyesight?Aside the poor resolution, another problem affected potential use of the AirBar for artistic work. For example, using it with my photoshop software, photoshop would not detect (or the AirBar would not send) a "mouse up" or "mouse down" signal, making it impossible to draw anything naturally. Every time you lifted up your finger off the screen, and then put it down again in another part of the screen, photoshop would simply connect those two points with your drawing/painted line, as if you had never lifted your drawing tool (i.e. finger) off the artboard (i.e. screen). I suppose one could lift up the finger, and then go to some other command in the interface, but this would seriously slow down any drawing or sketching process.The AirBar was an interesting but expensive experiment, and now it is gathering dust.

It repeatedly pops up a keyboard on my screen...not sure whyI'd want a touch keyboard when there's a keyboard on my laptop I can type much faster on (using all my fingers).Also it makes a high pitched beeping noise when jostled a bit, I don't know why.The touch screen worked like magic, I was really excited about that. It's really neat.However, it's finicky, and I don't like the onscreen keyboard that pops up (I can't find any option to remove it),and it seems to be confusing my laptop about all sorts of things.Like now when I use my mouse wheel to scroll, it thinks I'm pressing Control plus using the mouse wheel-- so it zooms in and out.I can sort of draw a smiley face, but it's not much better than using my mouse, honestly.It doesn't detect when my finger has lifted off the screen and come back down for the second eye.of the smiley,so it's like a cursive smiley.There's a bit of a delay, and also the position is not exact.The advantage of the mouse is that you can see where the pointer is before holding down left click,so you know where you are underlining or drawing.With AirBar, of coures there is no indicator where it's going to start drawing: maybe a centimeter above your finger.