June 26, 2009

CHINESE outfit Lenovo has decided that we all need bigger panic buttons on our laptops.

After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have installed 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.

The change is based on testing users on which keys they use the most. On average, they used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys, that hadn't been made bigger.

Lenovo decided to make these two keys about twice as long in the vertical direction to fit the way people reach up for them.

Apparently the next keyboard evolution could be the death of the caps lock. It comes from the days when you wrote headings in capitals but these days exists only to be accidently pressed, stuff up passwords, or make you shout online.

Still any innovation that Lenovo can come up with would be better than the latest genius software update it pushed on users. It fills your screen with annoying pop-up ads for Lenovo products and it can't be switched off.