Community Matters

I mentioned before in my article comparing the EeePC 901 with the 1000 that the keyboards of some Netbooks leave room for improvement. Today at IDF in Taipei I spent some time looking at the current crop of Netbooks and I realized that this is an endemic issue. Yes, there isn’t much space and therefore vendors have to make some compromises, but where these compromises impact day to day usability of the resulting computers, I think people are making a mistake.

The Asus EeePC 901 / 901 have the two-thirds sized ‘;‘ and ‘'‘ keys which make you hit ‘enter‘ when you want to hit ‘'‘. From what I could tell in the IDF showcase, the Netbooks from Founders, Lenovo, Toshiba and Dell share this unfortunate design. The only Netbooks that I found with regular keyboards were the Acer Aspire One and the EeePC 1000 / 1000H.

Even worse, the Netbooks from Dell, Sylvania and Lenovo had keys moved around to make their keyboard fit into the available space. Typing fast and blind on these systems will require a lot of getting used to – and jumping between these and standard keyboards is likely to be impossible. On several of these keyboard I had to stare long and hard to find keys like ‘~‘ or ‘\‘ on either side of the space bar (Sylvania) or ‘'‘ between the Windows Menu key and cursor left key (Dell) or the ‘]‘ not next to but below the ‘[‘, actually between the ‘'‘ key and enter.

I question the wisdom of these layouts…