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Lenovo Tinkers With Larger Delete and Escape Keys

Posted by timothy on from the boffins-are-everywhere dept.

Slatterz writes "After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have decided the time is right to install larger Delete and Escape keys on their updated ThinkPad laptop T400s range. While it is a small change, it is fairly radical to tinker with an area of hardware which has been largely unchanged since the 19th century. What convinced them to make the size-change was doing some tests on users to see which keys they use the most. They found that on average, people used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys that Lenovo hasn't made any bigger." The article says Caps Lock may be next on the agenda; death is too good for Caps Lock.

3 of 586 comments (clear)

  1. Nineteenth Century by Speare · · Score: 5, Informative

    Show me a keyboard that even HAD the Delete or Escape keys, idiot. Hell, when I learned to type, you had to use a lowercase L for the digit 1, and a capital O for the digit zero. Exclamation point was "apostrophe, backspace, period."

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  2. Re:HERE'S AN IDEA by Goldberg's+Pants · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is a ridiculous story as HP already messed with keyboards.

    Try checking out the HP laptop keyboards on Canadian laptops. Dear god the layout on those things is terrible. The old QWERTY stuff is in the right place but punctuation etc... Is all over the place. Absolutely horrendous keyboards. I wound up having to use a USB keyboard with it as the default keyboard is damn near unusable unless you like doing a LOT of deleting and retyping of stuff.

  3. Re:Boffins? by Cimexus · · Score: 5, Informative

    America doesn't use the word 'boffins'? That's such a 'regular' word (to me) that I never even realised it was slang. (I'm Australian but have lived in America for quite a while - never occurred to me you guys didn't use that word). Well you learn something every day.

    Sure enough though, you are right (according to Wiki). And the fact that most of the hits you get on Google if you search for the term are .au or .uk sites.

    Having said that, I think it's pretty obvious what it means given the rest of the sentence. Plus Slashdot often uses US slang (or not even slang, but US words which have other equivalents elsewhere) all the time in headlines, but that doesn't trouble the rest of us (too much). Context is your friend.