Stupid idea of the month—Toshiba laptop keyboards

I've ranted before about shiny screens on laptops and how unusable they are in many lighting situations. Now Toshiba has tried to go one better in the sheer stupidity stakes by equipping many of its new laptops with highly reflective keyboards.

Putting aside the fact that they look tacky, you can just about guarantee that at least one row of keys will be impossible to read at any give time because of reflections. This won't worry the experienced user who is a good touch typist, but the sort of people likely to buy a shiny bling-ridden laptop are also the users most likely to be hunt-and-peck typists who will be looking at their keyboards. Indeed, Toshiba's top-of-the-line business-oriented machines seem to have matte keys like the good old days.

And I thought laptop design stupidity had reached its limits--congratulations to Toshiba for raising the ante once againI

Silly idea of the week: Sony Vaio keyboards

Sony Vaio notebooks have traditionally been stylish, highly specced machines, but one has to wonder what Sony were thinking with their current keyboard design. All current models seem to have very square keys. They look neat and have a reasonable feel, but they are quite awful to type on. If you’re one of those typists who cleanly hits the middle of the keys each time, then you’ll probably not mind them, but the rest of us will be constantly catching the edges of other keys until the backspace key becomes well worn.

The three most important aspects of a laptop are, to my mind, the things one actually interacts with — screen, keyboard and pointing device. Most trackpads are abominations, the new shiny screens are great to watch movies on (for which you have a TV), but awful for working in almost any kind of lighting, and now Sony are trying to neuter the keyboard as well. Is this progress?

Silly idea of the week: Samsung E760 cellphone

Samsung’s latest mobile, the E760, is certainly a stylish piece of ear candy, but its ‘unique selling proposition’ is the silliest idea I’ve heard this week. To quote from the latest Link catalogue, in order to start the phone’s camera or mp3 player:

“…no need for keys, just shake the phone while holding the hotkey.”

No matter that you’ll look a complete dork standing there shaking your mobile, but you still have to hold down a key! Oh, sorry, it’s not a key, it’s a hotkey. I see the difference.

Save me from Dell screen protectors!

There's not all that much point in using screen protectors on your shiny new PDA if they make the screen much less usable and have to be replaced so often that you risk damaging your screen in the process.

So it is with the pathetic Dell-branded offerings I purchased with my Axim X50v. They are hard to get on without bubbles and dust being trapped underneath, and they scratch up horribly from the first stroke of the stylus. Six days the first one lasted before I was turning up my screen brightness to avoid looking at the horrible scratches.

What I and all other PDA users need is hard, non-sticky protectors which last a very long time. Such beasts do exist, for example, the highly regarded ClearTouch Crystal from Boxwave. I can't seem to find them in the UK, though, so it's on-line I must go. I'll report back as soon as I've tested them out.