Thinkpad, It's the little things

Since Lenovo's purchase of the ThinkPad brand of business oriented laptops from IBM, they have made subtle changes to the product without really diluting the features that made the IBM's so great.

In my opinion, there have been two, minute changes that annoyed me in the Lenovo era.

1. The Power, Volume and Access IBM keys- The design of these keys changed on from the T40 series to the T60 series. The keys looked cheap. I have no data to prove that the design was driven by cost savings concerns, but they sure appeared to be that way.

2. The Blue and Red highlights on the TrackPoint were removed. It seems hard to argue that this was not a cost savings effort. Although I never look at the keyboard or TrackPoint when I type, I have to say I missed the color contrast with the stark black (which I loved).

David Hill, ThinkPad Designer, has given us a breif peak at the a new ThinkPad. The video below shows small improvements to the proven keyboard. Simply increasing the size of the ESC and Delete keys seems like a no-brainer, now that they took that step...

Items 1 & 2 have also been addressed:

New Volume & Power Buttons

Touchpad Color

The keys in the video have the color accents and I beleive the newer X300's also have this feature.

David, keep up the good work!

Mac Power Books & TrackPoints

In the last few years, I have been interested in Mac PowerBooks. I like the OS and thought I might change things up from my trusty T series Thinkpad. I borrowed a small PowerBook from a friend for a few weeks and never got used to the touchpad.

I have suggested to several people mildly associated with Apple products (Apple Store Employees) that they should consider adding a TrakPoint. They looked at me like I raped their mom. They made statements to the effect, "I don't see them ever doing that." or "It doesn't fit with the brand image".

What am I missing. Touchpads are great if you don't know how to type. If you do know how to type (I am guessing <10% of the US falls within this category), you don't want to constantly reposition your hands on and off the keyboard.

Hell, I would actually like to have a Trackpoint on my Destop's keyboard at work. They did make keyboards with Trackpointers for some time in the 1990's, but they never caught on.

Apple, if a televised meeting between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is possible, Please, Tear down the Trackpoint wall!

I know there is probably only a small % of customers that use these Trackpointers, but they are a much more elegant solution than the Touchpad and are very important to people who know how to type. Right now, I am forced to continually purchase Thinkpads and I am slightly worried Lenovo will not carry on the tradition as IBM intended...

At least one person agrees with me: David Berlind @ ZD Net