The tech world has always had a fixation with making keyboards more flexible and customizable. It's why so many people lusted after the Optimus keyboards created by Russian designer Art Lebedev. The mission to make the keyboard more malleable pretty much died with the advent of ubiquitous touchscreens, however.

And yet, for all the hope of abandoning real keys in favor of fingers on glass, the humble keyboard has proved hard to kill. There is, after all, a reason the iPad Pro is only touted as a productivity machine with the addition of a real, physical, touchable keyboard. (This is also why I have little time for the other device ASUS announced today, a dual-touchscreen concept laptop called Project Precog.) By turning the touchpad into a touchscreen, ASUS adds another interface option -- but is it a persuasive one?

The inclusion of a secondary display inside a laptop's trackpad is pretty exciting, and ASUS' engineers should be proud of achieving this feat. Potentially, it's very useful if you want to offload tasks from your main screen to another display. Of course, it's worth saying that ASUS is not the first company to have tried this. Those with long memories will remember Windows Sideshow, Microsoft's long-dead attempt to do a similar thing with external hardware. Or Razer's Switchblade UI on the early Blade Pros, or the Acer Ethos, or MSI's GS70 Stealth Concept from 2013.

ASUS intends the ScreenPad to be more than just a notification window: It can run its own local apps, offer contextual commands and span the primary screen. In the first mode, the pad can run a day-to-view calendar, control music playback and run a calculator. It can also go in place of the Start menu to launch Windows Apps or let you goof off by sneakily watching TV at work.

The contextual shortcuts will be familiar to anyone who's seen and used the MacBook Pro with TouchBar. There, the company replaced the Function Row keys with a 2,170 x 60 OLED display that can offer customized buttons for specific applications. For the new ZenBook Pro, there are only four apps that can take advantage of ASUS' new hardware: Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as YouTube for Chrome.

For the former, you can use the contextual shortcuts to, for instance, alter the font size or select Bold, Italic and Underline, to what you're writing. You simply have to stretch your thumb down to the trackpad and select the relevant option. For the YouTube player, meanwhile, the playback controls are pushed to the ScreenPad to avoid cluttering the video itself.

It can also be used as a secondary display, letting you drag any window from the primary to the smaller screen. Although I wouldn't recommend you moving a full-sized Word document or browser down to the 5.5-inch pad. Instead, the best and most obvious use for the technology, right now, is as a numeric keypad for when you're doing some serious spreadsheetin'.

The first major roadblock came when I decided to type while using the ScreenPad to watch a YouTube clip. Because my hands (and wrists) hover over the chin of the laptop to reach the keyboard, much of the screen is obscured. Then I tried to use the contextual menus in Word, but it seemed like everything I could do was better suited to a keyboard shortcut. If you don't know that Ctrl+B emboldens the text, then there's a benefit there, but you'll lose precious seconds taking your hands away from the keyboard to do so.

And the longer I spent trying to navigate the complicated space between my wrists and the ScreenPad, the more I forgave Apple for the Touch Bar. It's far simpler to see the OLED strip while keeping your eyes on the display, and it's easier to reach, too. In retrospect, all of the head-scratching about why Apple did what it did made more sense when seeing how other companies tackled the same problem.