X10 Mini Pro, the keyboard review...

One of the things that most people interested in the Mini Pro are curious about is the keyboard. It's pretty good. Solid build, no creaking, back-lit, and keys spaced well.

But among all the qwerty phones I've had, P990i & P1i, including my Mini Pro, I have to say the P1i had the best qwerty board I've tried to date.

When I first saw the prototype photos of the P1i, I thought to myself, "WTF?!?!! What designer in their right mind would think of such a crazy design? Rocker keys THAT small????" ... cut to 5 hours after I bought my P1i... "WOW!!! This is just genius!"


Don't get me wrong, the Mini Pro keyboard is great. I just think the rocker design on the P1i was better. On such small keys, the rocker switch design led to far less typos, felt better under the thumb, and led to much faster typing right out of the box.

Next up... X10 Mini Pro battery review... real world testing...

apple slices...

I've been an Apple user for about 7 years now. My first Mac was a 12" Powerbook and I loved that little thing up until I got my current Black Macbook.

Although I still use Windows (currently going to switch from XP to 7 Ultimate), OSX has been my primary OS for the past year now.

One of the strangest things I've found with Apple is their symbols for their modifier keys.

If you've ever tried to learn a shortcut on a Mac, you'll know what I mean.



Here's a quick key guide to Apple's shortcuts:

- This is the Apple key, the strange flower looking symbol on it means "Command". So when a shortcut calls for pressing the Command or Apple key, this is it.

- For whatever reason, Apple uses this symbol for their CTRL key. I honestly don't know why this is symbol means CTRL. Any logical person would think it means the "6" key which has the ^ symbol on it.

- This weird symbol which does not appear on the Apple keyboards means OPTION (some Apple keyboards have the ALT on this key as well) ... I don't even know the origin of this symbol, nor why it is used in the Apple guides to depict shortcut keys when this does not appear on the keyboard at all.

You'd think that Apple would start printing these weird symbols that they've been using in their manuals to describe shortcuts on the actual keyboard they want you to use.

But they don't... and I guess that's that. This is Apple we're talking about here.

QWERTY

QWERTY... to anyone who types, this is the most common keyboard layout available today. And even though almost everyone has used this layout at some point in their lives, most people don't realize how this bizarre layout came to be.

The most common misconception is that QWERTY was created out of efficiency. To make typing easier. Quite the contrary. Back in the mechanical typewriter days, Christopher Latham Sholes invented the first commercial typewriter. The very first keyboard was actually laid out as ABCDEFG. But back then, as people would type faster, the hammers (those things that punch the letters onto the paper) would hit each other and get jammed more and more frequently.

In an effort to keep his machines from jamming, Sholes decided to move the most frequently used letters away from each other to prevent them from jamming when typing at high speed. This consequently gave rise to the other misconception that QWERTY was invented to slow down typists and to keep from having to re-engineer the typewriter mechanism. Well, it actually did both at the time. But basically, it was just to prevent mechanical jamming of the type arms.

Despite the odd layout, and inefficient placements of the letters, most modern typists can hit speeds of 70wpm, while others can reach as high as 120wpm.

The more modern keyboard layout, the Dvorak keyboard, has been created with efficiency, speed, and carpal tunnel syndrome in mind. Controversially claiming typing speeds of 400wpm once a typist gets familiar with the keys.