Type-Off: Is ThinkPad's New Island Keyboard Better or Worse? [Keyboards]
Lenovo ThinkPads have a strong, almost cult-like following, and for good reason. This sturdy, high-performance line of business notebooks has long-set the gold standard for keyboard quality, with fantastic tactile feedback, great key layouts and slightly convex keys that are easy to find by feel. So when the company ditched the classic keyboard for a new island-style unit on its entire 2012 lineup, many ThinkPad fans were understandably concerned. Laptop Mag's Avram Piltch put both keyboards through the ringer. So what's the final verdict? Would the new keyboard be as good as last year's model or was Lenovo just trying to make its notebooks look more contemporary, while sacrificing quality? To answer this question, we put last year's ThinkPad T420 (classic keyboard) head-to-head against the new ThinkPad T430 in a no-keys-barrred type-off. We also talked to Lenovo's Chief Designer David Hill and Keyboard Guru Aaron Stewart of Lenovo to get their perspective on the c...