Imre@FoxPop - Sub standard sub-keyboards

To me, sub notebooks are defined by their screen size - everything with a 12" or smaller screen is a sub in my eyes. Portability was and is very important to me, my laptops used to travel with me to work and back, to the countriside and back. As carry anywhere machines, weight was an important factor; I have found that 2 kg is a good balance between weight and performance, and is still easy to carry all day long on me. While these devices excel in squeezing so much power into such a small casing, they lag behind other laptops in keyboard ergonomics. We take a round up about the keyboard designs of the biggest name sub-notebook manufacturers and also give a look at some of the PDA keyboards.

My very first was a Compaq Armada M300 (Pentium III 600 MHz), which had a keyboard of very low quality and some half sized buttons on the sides. It had a strange tactile feedback and I always had to look on the keyboard to properly press Insert and Del. At least, Compaq offered a proper Hungarian layout, with all the important accented character keys present. After some time, I got used to the feel of the keyboard and also to the placement of the cursor keys and I was back to almost normal typing speed.

Proper Hungarian layout of the Compaq Armada M300. All character
keys are in place, but cursor keys like Insert and Del are small and
hard to locate in the right top corner. The [í] key, next to left shift is
smaller in size.

Then came the IBM ThinkPad X20 (Pentium III 600 MHz), which had such a wonderful keyboard, well built, joy to use. It even had the proper official Hungarian layout with all the keys at the right place. Well, originally it came with a US keyboard, but I could order the Hungarian keyboard at IBM’s support desk in Budapest (wow, it was a hefty $100). The only downside was the lack of the Win key, but I did not use it those times – now I use it excessively to bring up the Start menu and launch applications with the Win,E like sequences. Also, two character keys next to P were smaller in size, which I did not like. (The screenshot shows the US keyboard).

The original US keyboard of the IBM ThinkPad X20. This sub-notebook
had the arrangement that was the closest to my liking, however there
was no [Win] key.

Then my Toshiba Portégé 2000 (Pentium III-M 750 MHz ULV) came. I really hesitated to buy it because of its unusual keyboard arrangement. It was a US keyboard, it even had a key less than required. Toshiba told me that for this particular model, the Portégé 2000, there is no Hungarian keyboard, what they can offer is a UK keyboard which has the key in extra, needed for other languages. It cost also $100, and was a major disappointment, as it was basically a US keyboard with an extra key next to the spacebar. I had no choice, had to live with it. The keyboard otherwise was of excellent quality, it was even better than the legendary IBM ThinkPad keyboards, so after all I liked it. I have swapped some of the keys, the Y-Z and | and 0 were exchanged to correspond to the software layout. I think our Hungarian industry was and still is heavily influenced by the German technology and probably this is why the Hungarian keyboard standard has the same Y-Z location as on German keyboards, reverse to US and UK English.
There is something I still liked in the Toshiba arrangement, the Fn key was after the Ctrl key. The most common Ctrl+ keystorkes, like Ctrl+C to copy, or Ctrl+Z for undo, are almost hard programmed into my fingers and I expect the Ctrl key to be in the left corner, similar to desktop keyboards. Unfortunately, there was no right Ctrl on my Toshiba, which is horrible.

UK keyboard of the Toshiba Portégé 2000. This is a US style arrangement,
with an extra key left to [Space]. This was the hardest to use arrangement of all,
with valuable character keys in the bottom row and [Ins] - [Del] also both in the
bottom row at very unusual places. There is a [Win] and [Local Menu] key, but
in a hard to reach top row position. The awkward key arrangement was a strong
point in the decision to stop using my otherwise excellent Toshiba Portégé recently .

In between, I also had an Apple iBook G3 600 MHz, and to my surprise, although the Hungarian market is so small, it was no problem to order a Hungarian keyboard with the official layout. Well, it was the Macintosh standard, but in the Macintosh world it was the way to go, and it was of good quality and good layout. Cudos for Apple for that – they are still on the top of my list for laptop keyboards. Like the Toshiba, the iBook also only had a left Ctrl, which is not so bad on the Apple, as most of the hotkeys go with the Apple key.

Hungarian keyboard of the Apple iBook G3 600MHz. All character keys are full size
and in the right position, most cursor keys are comfortable placed. The [Enter] key
was a bit smaller and had to be hit on the top. If you switch often between US and
International arrangements, you rather get you used to hit [Enter] on the bottom,
which works on both arrangements. What is funny, that [F6-10] keys are almost never
used on Apple systems. [Esc] was small, but well positioned.

Unfortunately, Apple had and still has problems to make a proper Hungarian software layout for OS X. Some software work with the built in Unicode Hungarian layout, others don't, some work only with the software layout from OS 9 (which requires a manual installation). In the end, I gave up and made a layout for myself, called HungarianPro, which includes the benefits of all the various Hungarian layouts and works with 95% of the applications. Shame on you, Apple.

I am still undecided whether it is good or not to have a keyboard on a handheld device for us, international users. There are always a lot of keys missing for proper international input, they are to small for real touch type, and I get tired of the multitude of Fn / Shift / Ctrl combinations to enter accented characters, especially when typing with two thumbs.

My first mobile device with the possibility of text input was the HP 17BII business calculator. It had the characters in alphabetical order, quite functional, but worked, and I was always busy putting in text before my tests in High School. Then my HP48G followed, with the same ABC like layout.

My Psion S5 was a real joy to type on, for almost a year I lived on my S5 and a 56k modem to e-mail. I could type with 4 or 6 fingers on it, was a funny experience. My Psion Siena and 3mx was rather uncomfortable for longer text input, but then my Series 7 followed. First, I was impressed by the almost full sized keys, then I faced the same problem as with the S5. To type English, it was OK, to type in Hungarian, it was miserable. We have 9 extra accented characters on the Hungarian layout compared to the English and I use all of them while typing. There were three methods to overcome this problem. A macro called 'Ekezet' for Macro5 transformed 'ee' into 'é', 'oe' into 'ö', etc. It was pretty fast and comfortable when typing long texts, however I did not like the continuous switch on/off sequences when entering data into various fields in Agenda or Data. I could enter data with Fn+ASCII code sequences, which was OK for occasional use, but the best was still FKMap. With the help of FKMap on the Psion Series 7, I could swap the Y and the Z keys finally (I also exchanged them on the keyboard) and allocate some of the accented characters to \, ' and such. The S7 had otherwise a very good quality keyboard, with the still unusual arrangement of some of the keys.

Proprietary layout of the Psion Series 7. Altogether 4 important
character keys were missing from this keyboard, which made it
particularly hard to touch type with all those Macro5 and Fn+[] solutions.

Palm devices originally work with a stylus, which never worked well for me. It is just too slow for me. I am a serious user of Fitaly, which is a small "on screen keyboard", now stays as a sticker over the Graffiti are of my Tungsten T. Entering international characters with Fitaly is much easier compared to key combinations and I like it a lot. I could not resist the temptation to get an external keyboard for my Tungsten T, but the Palm Ultrathin Keyboard failed at the same point as others - it only supports US English (and German). There was no possibility to alter key mappings for my Hungarian needs, and I was frustrated by the 6 possible uses of each button (6 modifier keys), even numbers had to be entered with Fn keys. After the initial positive feel, I discovered that I did not use it since I bought it and wrote that positive review for Foxpop. The worst thing with it is still the exchanged position of the Y and Z keys.

The Palm UltraThin keyboard for the Palm Tungsten T had a revolutionary
folding design and a very small footprint, but was also very uncomfortable
to use because of the multitude of FnBlue, FnGreen, Alt, Ctrl and Shift key
combinations, because of the lack of proper number keys and because of
the very unusual arrangement of cursor keys. The cut-in-two space bar was
just the extra pain on the top. I only used this keyboard 3-4 times as a result.

The HP iPaq 4350 is one of the few Pocket PCs with a thumb keyboard and it got a huge amount of positive feedback in internet reviews. But again, it supports only US English, to enter international characters, you have to use again these awkward key combinations, which ruins everything. Still, I think this keyboard can be handy for use with an English-English dictionary for example, I still have in my mind to get a HP 4350 and load it up with Collins CoBuild, so then I have an high quality electronic dic with keyboard. Can be very handy when reading English journals or watching divx.

The thumb keyboard of the HP 4350 favours again US English users only.
The lack of a second shift on the right side is a major downside in my eyes.

It seems that the IT world is still very much dominated by the US traditions, which makes my typing life in Europe very uncomfortable. I do believe that to manufacture a proper standard layout is just a fraction of the total cost of a sub-notebook. What is more, to offer language variations for every country is a real necessity, if IBM is able to do that, I don't understand why others cannot make it. For me, it is a shame that the Asus sub-notebooks come now with full sized, properly arranged Hungarian keyboards, but Toshiba and HP don't.
With PDAs, the biggest issue is the size, the keys are usually so small that touch typing is out of question, then key combinations have to be used to enter international characters. I tend to forget these combinations, and when the special keys are not symmetrically placed, I have to move out my hands from the base touch typing position. Like the HP 4350 has only one Shift - so I have to do finger gymnastics for the left side Capitals.

Even sub-notebook and PDA keyboards should be very conservative in the placement of the keys and be close to the standard layout as much as possible.

Half-sized or down sized important keys should be avoided .- character keys, Ins, Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn should be full sized.

I almost never use PrtScr, Scroll Lock and Pause, they could be moved to Fn+Key combinations instead of taking up the place from other keys.

There shouldn't be any character key in the bottom row (next to the space bar), it is against touch typing customs and habits.

The order of Ctrl - Win - Alt -Space - AltGr - Win - Local Menu - Ctrl keys should not be changed. Once I get used to it, it is very hard to get adapted a new position.

Win and Local Menu keys should not be omitted.

I am Hungarian, we are in 2004, therefore I want to be able to properly type in my language on my sub-notebook. I think this is not a question of technology, this is a question of marketing. And if Toshiba provides only English keyboards on his laptops, while Asus provides Hungarian, I will go for the Asus.

During the last years, there had been a lot of improvements in sub-notebook manufacturing, machines are lighter in weight and better in performance now. However, the general looks and designs are the same as before. The IBM X40 looks and feels the same as the X20, the Toshiba Portégé R200 is indistinguishable from the original Portégé 2000. Fortunately, Hp had put a better quality keyboard into the HP NC4010 finally - though, the arrangement of the keys is still the same as in the M300.

When the cpu power of sub-notebooks is pretty adequate for office use, and when mobile vga chips are slowly getting built into these highly portable devices, too, I think we are pretty OK on the performance side. I do hope that manufacturers will turn now to come out with devices of better keyboard ergonomics.