This is the new Roland E-X10 portable keyboard from Roland Europe,
it`s just a screen shot from a very long email,to me it looks rather basic but perhaps that`s the market Roland are targeting.There`s
more information on Roland Europe web site.

Yeah, Roland have abandoned the pro and semi-pro markets altogether, and just recycle some older tech for the hobbyist market.

Shame really, as the BK9 needed very little to turn it into a powerhouse…

I have studied the manual of these entry-level Rolands, and it appears that key elements of the operating system are borrowed from Yamaha. So IMO, not a "real" Roland.

The only recent keyboard that preserves much of the classic Roland arranger operating system, is the FP-E50. I would characterise that one as having a middle-of-the-line feature set. Of course it's a weighted piano action, albeit with arranger features. My $.02.

Would you mind elaborating on this, Ted? What elements are from Yamaha that weren’t in Roland’s? Are you familiar with the EA7? That was Roland’s final shot at the pro/semi-pro market, and had quite a lot of new OS enhancements that bore similarities to other brands… Multipads, a sampler, button heavy layout etc.

Unfortunately, it was Roland’s last attempt, and many of the new features needed polishing and improving (the sampler had only 128MB - yes, MB! Yamaha and Korg had GB’s of memory🤬).

But if you’re seeing some Yamaha and Korg similarities, it might be that it’s the descendent of Roland’s last pro effort.

what I find so frustrating about the BK9 is the fact they could probably just release an app that allows you to have full control of the OS... The Apps that are already available for the BK9 are "great"... but there's alot more to be had...

The thing about apps is, when all is said and done, they are just fancy MIDI remotes. If there’s no hook into the OS in the first place, it’s very difficult to control those parameters.

To be honest, the BK9 had all the elements (or at least, most of them… you’d still need audio loops to do multipads) for a terrific arranger. It could store chord sequences, and it could store .jpg’s to display on a connected screen (so there’s your full sheet music display!) but, unlike audio synced loops (Roland’s other major OS addition), there was no way to Link those chord sequences and .jpg’s to a Performance, effectively rendering the features useless in a live situation.

They also introduced for the first time having multiple Drum Tracks, which allows you to mix and match kits and percussion (the new Latin kits are spectacular!) but they didn’t have any styles (that I can recall) that used this feature. It wasn’t until the EA7 came out that Roland’s style creators got around to using this feature much (and even there it was rare).

With the Key Audio (synced audio loops) feature, you had an equivalent to most arrangers’ multipad system, with the advantage of it being audio! But Roland failed to include ANY content for the user to start with (despite having an enormous backlog of content for their samplers and grooveboxes). Not even a site where you could download some.

Roland had all the parts, but failed to put it all together. So near, and yet so far!

Not to mention, the problem with full app control is how long do the manufacturers support it? How long do they keep porting it over to newer tablet OS’s?

Roland has already orphaned many of their tablet apps. And because they chose to do them Apple only, once the app is discontinued, you can’t even get the app for an older tablet because of the closed nature of the Apple Store.

I like computer apps better, because, even if you need to upgrade your OS for security reasons, you can keep a clone drive with the old OS. And programmers tend to update apps for newer OS’s a lot more than Roland do!

Which features do you consider ‘borrowed from Yamaha’, Ted?

Sorry all, I've been away on vacation and not checking the boards.
Diki I am familiar with the E-A7, and these new entry level models have nothing borrowed from it.
The chord fingering and style file format are pure Yamaha, to the point that my favored Roland "short cuts" will not work, I would essentially have to relearn. Chord recognition, and how the arranger manipulates the recorded style pattern are key facets of an arranger and would be very expensive to develop (or re-develop) from scratch. It's possible that Roland licensed this technology from Yamaha, or the boards are actually made on a production line with Yamaha's and are branded Roland. It's been a while since I really dug into these manuals, but there might have been other things I noticed as well.
Further proof is that the downloadable content being sold on Roland's website that work with the new models, doesn't work with the FP-E50 and legacy Rolands. Did you (or anyone else) look at the manuals? What was your conclusion?

Will it load Yamaha styles, then? Or is it simply a copy protected Roland style format?

I seem to remember that the primary differences between Yamaha styles and Roland was that Yamaha’s had a Break/Fill, whereas Roland always simply had a Break, and Roland went with four Intros and Endings to Yamaha’s three.

There were also considerable differences between style editing systems, with Yamaha allowing user control of things like range and wraparound. I’m guessing this new one has no style editing at all, if it’s locked behind the same paywall that the FP-E50 is, right?

To be honest, I don’t spend as much time reading the manuals of gear I have absolutely no interest in, any more!

Once again, we bump up against the major drawback of not learning full chords… if a manufacturer changes their shortcuts, it’s game over. But regular chords have always (and always will) played just fine. Chord shortcuts lock you into an ecosystem you have no guarantee it will never change. Perhaps it’s time to spend a while learning the proper fingerings? It doesn’t look like there’s any forward path for that old Roland system…