Keyboards

[tmcg]

I was this close to pulling the trigger on a Dell Inspiron 710m I have in an online shopping cart when I stopped at Circuit City to pick something up and decided to try out the keyboards on whatever ultralight notebooks they had there. (I gather that not many other people do that. They want to know how pretty movies will look on the screen, or how good the speakers sound, or something. I spent nearly fifteen minutes going from machine to machine, typing in long passages of Shakespeare. The sales rep was courteous but bemused. *g*) The Sony Vaio SZ somethingsomething 120 had the most comfortable notebook keyboard I've ever tried. It was perfectly natural, no adaptation required. From the first line I typed, it felt as though I'd been typing on it for years.

No matter how I price it out, though, to get the same extended warranty and extra RAM and other stuff, the Vaio (or a super-ultralight Toughbook, also of interest) would cost me an extra thousand dollars. Dell's deals really do make them hard to resist, despite the decrapification required. If I can find an Inspiron 710m to type on before the promotions run out on the one I configured, and I really hate the keyboard, I'll think about going for the Vaio. But for grand's difference in price...I'm a really good typist and a musician and I can adapt to anything I have to.

Still, I'm in love with that Vaio keyboard. I'm still having a tactile affair with it in my head, hours after testing it out.

(Interestingly, a lot of the reviews I've read, on review sites and from users, complain about the Vaio's keyboard. Which makes me leery of the complaints I've read about the Inspiron's. And the word "Vaio" is itself weirdly hard to type. I've had to type it twice every time in this post. Maybe that's telling me something.)

Comments

[merlinpole.livejournal.com]

I have a dead Vaio as one of the machines I've used; the keyboard on it isn't my favorite. On the other hand, people's taste in keyboards and such can differ dramatically. I tend to pound on my rather hard, I think. (And then there was the retired Marine colonel I worked with years ago, I was complaining about a keyboard, and he said, "I never noticed, I type using two fingers." "Oh, that's right, you're a Marine, aren't you," I retorted...).

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

My other worry is that the unit in the store was a mumblemumblestringoflettersandnumbers model 120. The closest one on Sony's Website is a 140. Who knows, the slight difference between them could be the keyboard. Maybe I even liked the keyboard on the store's unit because hundreds of people had already pounded it down. Too many variables! Aieeeee!

I think I will go with the best deal. Thanks for the data, though, and the funny story about the marine. *g*