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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

keyboard layout

I'm in the market for a netbook right now and have the same concerns.

Currently I'm torn between the Asus X101 and the Lenovo S100 (both announced to launch this month). The Lenovo comes with an 98%-size keyboard that looks really promising on the photos: http://ces.cnet.com/2300-32488_1-10006040-2.html

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The Lenovo keyboard layout looks kosher for touch-typists. If I was in the market for a netbook I'd jump in that direction.

(The right-shift-FAIL seems to be a bad habit of Asus and a few other Chinese/Taiwanese vendors; I suspect Lenovo still have some input from IBM.)

One thing that bothers me about IBM/Lenovo is that the Fn key is where control should be.

I have an Eee PC with the same style of keyboard as the X101 and I can't really think of anything negative about it. It's the best laptop keyboard I've ever used and I've reached speeds up to 130 wpm on it.

A friend of mine recently got a lenovo thinkpad and it had a BIOS flag to allow swapping of the Fn and control key, sadly the physical keys are different size so you can't swap them to match the new function but at least it's an option

Sad day for typists when the Home/End/PgUp/PgDn/Insert/Delete block getting blown up all over is considered kosher.

Sadly that has happened years ago and I don't have much hope for them to make a comeback. I'm in fact worried about the day when apple stops selling their full-size desktop keyboards in favor to the crippled laptop-version.

When you look at the whitespace (well, red-space) on the right side of the Lenovo then there is plenty room to fit a full-size Home/End/Pgup/Pgdn block.

But it would look a little odd. And I suppose Soccer-mom doesn't buy laptops that look odd for sake of fitting keys that she doesn't use. Soccer-moms apparently prefer glitter over usable keyboards...

I also just noticed that laptop doesn't have a dedicated F12 key, it's Fn-F11. Tempora, mores, etc.

Have you considered the Thinkpad x120e? The keyboard, performance, and battery life are all excellent. It's a bit more expensive than what you're looking at, though.

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