The Keyboard of Tomorrow, Available Today?

Lenovo has taken a huge, and risky, step, by making radical changes to the keyboard layouts on its latest line of business-end laptops, the ThinkPad T400.  They spent a year researching what keys people use, and how, to try and come up with a layout that will make the most-used keys accessible and easier to use.

The keys they moved and resized?  The Escape and Delete keys.

It turns out that people hit the delete and escape keys as many as 700 times a week.  Thier current position and size oftem makes hitting those keys dicey, and often messes with your insert and/or home/end keys as well, repositioning your cursor just when you are getting your typing groove on.

Over the years, different keyboard designs have emerged, but few other than the well-known QWERTY ever remain on the market long.  I use a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard on my desktop machine, and find it to be very comfortable, but most people I talk to think the ergo keyboard is absurd and useless.  I have had a success of laptops over the years, but the layouts of most of them were identical to each other, with the exception of my first Dell, which put the delete key second button over from the right.  My current Dell has the key on the upper firht.  It is wider than the function keys next to it, but not as tall as the Home key below it.  I’ve also had the opportunity to play with a Netbook, and easily dismissed its keyboard as being completely useless.  The keyboard is too small, but also, several important keys have  been rearranged, most notably, the quote/double quote key.  As a fiction writer, this one element alone was enough to make me throw the little unit out the window.

In the new Lenovo keyboard layout, the delet and escape key are twice as high as the keys around it, but just as wide.  The delete key, particularly, is placed in such a way as to make it much less likely that you’ll hit Insert, Home/End as you might on other keyboards.  Will the new layout be appreciated or scorned?  Only time will tell, but I think having some studies to back it up makes a big difference in overall acceptance.  If the change improves typing, then I’m all for it, as long as I don’t have to learn anything new.