[ltp] T440s report

[Rob Tomsick]

On Thu, 2013-12-05 at 06:40 -0800, David Griffith wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Dec 2013, Ismael Olea wrote:
> 
> > Just want to share this:
> >
> > Havoc Pennington, hacker extraordinarie, has written his report of T440s
> > with Linux. https://twitter.com/havocp/status/408255491953807361
> 
> I never thought I'd say it, but I think I'll pass on the Thinkpad line at 
> least until I see what the T450 looks like.  The business with screwing up 
> the keyboard was bad enough.  Now they've removed the physical mouse 
> buttons in favor of a clicky touchpad. 

The annoying part about it is that while the pad on the T440s and
similar generation ThinkPads sucks, Lenovo actually has (and uses) a
better mechanism on the ThinkPad Helix.

On the Helix, the "clickpad" seem to have buttons at the individual
corners, so there is a very tangible difference between a left and right
click; the pad is actuated only on the side that you click.  With the
T440 and friends, the entire pad clicks down while still remaining
perfectly horizontal -- which results in A) a much deeper sensation of
travel B) more force being required to click C) a loss of tactile
feedback.

In other words, Lenovo had a better mechanism that achieved the same
thing, yet ignored it in favor of developing a worse solution.

-Rob