Laptop Keyboard Ergonomics

The design and feel of laptop keyboards always seemed very similar across the board in my experience. However, there were/are exceptions to this rule. To me, the ultimate laptop keyboard was that of my old IBM Thinkpad T22. The keys were perfectly spaced and the ancillary functions were so easy to figure out, I could turn down my laptop speaker's volume, turn on the keyboard LED, and put the machine on hibernate with my eyes closed. After that laptop, all other keyboards seemed very inadequate to me.

I'm pleased to say that my new laptop, the Lenovo IdeaPad Z565, has a keyboard that will make my yearning for my old T22 keyboard go away. As you can see from the image on the right, Lenovo opted to go with the "chiclet layout" that's become vogue with laptop these days thanks to the MacBooks. I'm definitely a bigger fan of this assembly versus the interconnected keys that would inevitably pop off when my cat decides to use my laptop as a butt heater. Beyond the assembly, you can see that the laptop's size affords it the ability to actually have a relatively full-sized keyboard complete with numeric pad. It took about a day to get used to NOT crunching my hands together to adhere to a small layout. Now that I have gotten accustomed to having a full-sized keyboard on a laptop, I don't think I'll ever be able to go back to the old standard laptop keyboards.