An online survey by users show a majority prefer a trackpoint (pointing stick) mouse. Reviewers are 90 percent otherwise. What’s wrong with this picture. I went out to various sites to look at laptops…and all the help-me-choose features completely omit the pointing device as a criterion.
In picking a new laptop, if I get down to that, I swear to you, more than screens or other stuff, more than fancy covers, lighted keys (I couldn’t care less)—it’s the pointing device, stupid. If you use a laptop at top speed, you are utterly dependent on the style of reach you’re used to. Period.
So what’s with these people? I’m halfway convinced it’s power games among manufacturers, willingness to use certain suppliers, exclusive contracts, patents, whatever else is going on. But in my own opinion, I’d as soon input direct code than reach off the homing keys and break my rhythm and train of thought to find a mouse and use it. It’d be faster.
The only device that will work for me, the way I think and use a keyboard, is a trackpoint. Right now they’re being reserved for ‘high end business’ machines. Meaning you pay 3x the normal cost to get a trackpoint if you don’t go IBM.
Frustrated. Looks like I’m going to go on refurbing this machine until it absolutely can’t run software. I’m into my 3rd keyboard on it and I’ve maxed out the memory, and I’m feeling the need for more room, but it ain’t gonna happen if I have to use a mouse. No way, no how, not in a million years.
So what specific models of laptop does anybody know that have this pointing device. IBM, I know. They’re saying Toshiba. I don’t know. Dell, but they’re phasing it out of anything affordable. Information, anyone?
If you dock your laptop you can always get a keyboard like this I suppose:
http://www.shopping.com/xPO-IBM-USB-Keyboard-with-UltraNav-31P8950
Trackpoints just don’t seem to come with laptops these days. At least the kind you can walk in and buy from Best Buy or something. I did find that this line of retro 90s looking laptops (they aren’t actually from the 90s, but their shell looks oldish to me) seem to still have the trackpoints. I’ve never owned one of them before but they seem to have a fan base online.
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/t-series/t400?cid=US1A18202&
There’s just one hit for “Notebook trackpoint” on amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/LENOVO-ThinkPad-Notebook-discrete-graphics/dp/B002A34MWM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1249740209&sr=1-1
That’s from Lenovo, and at $1559, I wouldn’t call it cheap 🙁
Maybe this link will help…it has a listing of sorts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick
If it’s any consolation, I’m with you. I lost my track point 3.5 years ago, and I’ve regretted it every day since. I’m working fine on a Mac, but it’s not a track point, and I don’t have your issues.
Good luck finding one you like!
Oddly, even though I worked a long time at the Toshiba laptop division, I never used a track point. The alternative, to my taste, is not a trackball or a touch pad (or heaven forbid, a touch screen) but knowing all the keyboard shortcuts for navigation by word, line, page. Sometimes changing the keyboard repeat speed can help.
I’m not a fast typist, so I’m completely with you on not taking that long journey over to the mouse. Programs that require two hands one the keyboard and a third on the mouse annoy me no end. But tasks like reformatting text work pretty well with one hand on the mouse and one doing alt-whatever to reformat–but I have big hands.
I don’t know a better list than the Wikipedia article.
When they say a majority of users prefer track points, who are they surveying? I ask, because I have never met anyone who liked or used them. And I work with a bunch of people who are on the computer a lot.
This was an online survey: I don’t think it was CNet, but I’m not sure. I was searching a number of sites at the time.
Edit: yep, it was CNET. http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10010673-1.html
Ah…interesting, and I think I see why the numbers are the way that they are. The only choices are between touchpad, pointing stick, and “doesn’t matter”. Given that choice, I’m not sure that the results can be extrapolated to “over a mouse”. I know that I detest touchpads, because they do mess with where I want to be typing. So I would take a pointing stick over it. But I would take a mouse over either!
The poll was skewed in several directions. ‘external mouse’ is many users’ preferred item of choice. Also, people who see themselves as a persecuted minority tend to be more vocal than those in a majority setting, and are more likely to fill out the poll to make themselves heard. Thirdly, if the entry point for that page for many users is a search for ‘trackpoint mouse’ then the audience is likely to be biased to start with.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Always fun.
My personal experience matches yours – CJ is the only person I know who prefers a track point. (Ok, Adrianne upthread is the other.) I know a number of people who hate them, and met a couple who were ambivalent. Me, I found it awkward and difficult to use.
The best place to get one is Lenovo, apparently: no price jump for having one. THat’s IBM, fyi.
But I absolutely refuse to use a mouse. They’ve good for opening windows, say, launched at a good baseball throw-rate. Otherwise they’re a mess. First time I ever saw one, at a trade fair, everyone who encountered it had the same reaction: flip it over and manipulate its tummy directly, heck with scooting it around a limited pad. Everybody said it was a stupid design, and I haven’t changed my opinion a bit.
I game. I can whack goblins with the best of them—and with a track point, I’m murder on goblins. I cannot possibly see doing it with a mouse. And typing? Just whack 30-40 wpm off my usual 100 wpm rate. Ie, a book a year, is the diff between a mouse and a trackpoint.
And a touchpad? I had a computer that had one. I was never so glad to get rid of a nuisance. You want to take something to the extreme? YOu’re always just a hair short of having room enough. And does the shape of the touchpad reflect the screen shape? NAW…
Now they’ve taken to off-centering the touchpad, and if anything, I’m a right-handed mouser. Having it under my left hand would prompt nothing but an intense desire to take a hammer to the keyboard.
Can you say opinionated?
I was quite shocked to find that trackpoint prefer-ers are in the majority among laptop users. Not a large majority…but a couple of points. And that’s NOT what the laptop manufacturers are promoting. I have this nasty sneaking suspicion they’ll refuse to ship to any reviewer that won’t say they prefer mice. I detest conspiracy nuts—but I’m sure this IS a conspiracy. Why else would manufacturers doggedly fail to produce what the majority of their consumers would rather have?
I happen to think that a mouse is a perfectly logical thing – I’m much better moving my hand than manipulating something with my fingers.
A trackpad – drawing lines with my fingers – is even more intuitive to me. I love mine – it’s precise. I own a graphics tablet, but unless I intend to spend a couple of hours doing graphics, I tend to do my image manipulation with the trackpad – I can hit pixels precisely enough with it that it’s not worth the hassle to plug the other thing in and to move my hands off the keyboard.
HP’s business laptops have ’em. Prices are a bit spendy, dammit… You might be well advised to find a USB keyboard with a point stick, and just plug it in. Easier to replace when you wear ’em out anyway…
Jcrow, I was hoping you’d chime in, because HP would be my preference: Jane’s is beautiful, but I could no more use that off-center touchpad of hers than I could fly. I tried the HP site, and couldn’t even find one, not a single one.
Unfortunately I use my laptop in an easy chair, twisted into a pretzel, or on the couch, or a dozen other places (never at a desk: kills my back), am so iffy re vision that I can’t use the screen further off than it is on my lap, and can’t use an independent thingie, plus my hands would still have to leave the keyboard, and I’d still lose that 40 wpm in speed. I spent a whole 45 minutes on the HP site going through every display, trying to find a model that has it, and still no joy. Sigh.
I think your use has a lot to do with your preference. My laptop is on a table, and I have a wrist support in front of it, so using the trackpad is easy for me.
Try contacting customer support. That’s what they’re there for.
CJ, the laptops w/point stick are business comps; it’s a different business segment and not found at shopping.hp.com, which is home-use in focus. And, I fear, significally more expensive. Watch email, I will send further info there.
Oh, and meant to also say: HP laptops with point stick have the ability to switch off the touchpad, via a button just above the tp.
I’ve always thought (at least for myself) that once you love a keyboard, you’ll never be happy with anything else. It’s a combination of comfort, usability, preference, and just, basically, “feel” that’s hard to articulate but you know it when you have it.
The little trackpoint nub sounds like the same thing for you, and it’s logically understandable from a hands-on-the-keyboard point of view. More important, it’s just right for you. Unfortunately as you have found, it’s not popular now and seems to be on the way out.
Modern trackpads are far superior to their predecessors in function and ergonomics, but are fundamentally different in concept and execution from the keyboard-like trackpoint.
Back in the day of character cell terminals (pre mice !), one used arrow keys (and others depending on the system) to move the insertion point. I was faster and more precise for entering and editing text with that interface than I am now. WYSIWYG, proportional fonts, etc, killed off the gridded layout of terminals, so arrowing about becomes very hard. Shortcuts (like skip by word, forward or back) were eliminated or tucked away in favor of mouse/clicking.
It still miss this one:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/53/Lk201.jpg
Now I’m using this, which although very different, has a great key feel. Based on appearance I did not expect to like it, but it’s actually great.
http://macapper.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/keyboard.jpg
When my daughter and I were shopping for her college computer, we really liked the Fujitsu laptops. Very solid, pro-level systems, far more solid than the more ordinary Dells and their ilk. Fujitsu is hard to find in stores (impossible where we are) since they are basically business systems, but there may be a university nearby that would have them.
Might be worth a look. Their online store is well done (a good sign):
http://store.shopfujitsu.com/fpc/Ecommerce/productoverview.do?type=NB&pgid=Notebooks
I’d forgotten all about track points. until I looked at that link to Wikipedia, I didn’t know what it was. personally i don’t have to go looking for the mouse myself, but I think touchpads are pretty much the work of the devil. Haven’t used trackpoints enough to form a meaningful opinion
I don’t know what the difference is between a trackpoint mouse and a normal mouse …. I have a mouse with a wheel thing for scrolling on my pc, and on the macbook I use the touchpad, which is amazing, no problem with the fit to the screen or anything like that, and I have got the hang of the mac version of right click, in fact I can’t even remember what it is because I don’t think about it – oh it’s 2 fingers on the touch pad and one on the bottom section) … I presume this is a mac type good design bonus. I can use it for photoshop and anything else, can even draw with it; just sometimes I do reach for it when I am using the pc, which is confusing … but then I am no typist – 2 fingers only.
>and all the help-me-choose features completely omit the pointing device as a criterion.
There’s a german prize comparison site that allows for using “trackpoint” as criterion:
http://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/ProductCategoryFilters/3751F766071.html#Display
They list a total of 281 notebooks, but of only three makes: Acer (3), Toshiba (1) and Lenovo (277).
A trackpoint, pointing stick, or track stick is a 1/3″ rubber-capped joystick above the B key. You use it with 2 fingers, the right middle finger to move the stick, which has full range of the display screen, and the right thumb to hit the 2 mouse buttons immediately under the space bar. Your fingers never leave the region of the home keys, your hands never move from the homing position, and it’s fast. They get looser as they age, and wear to your touch, so they become increasingly personal ini ‘touch’. They’re the absolute best for high speed typists, data entry, and shooting goblins, at which they rival any independent joystick. Left thumb for the space bar, right thumb for the joystick buttons, and reposition of the cursor is middle right finger.
I LOVE the HP Jane got, and would get one for me in a New York minute if it had a trackpoint.
A slight tremor in my right hand (from childhood) dictates that, while I can fence, shoot skeet or a bow successfully, positioning a regular mouse for me is a several minute operation culminating in getting it just so and carefully taking my hand off it before I jostle it again. I fare better with a trackball. But we did find a USB trackpoint for the desktop, because while doing the taxes I would sit in there and swear a blue streak, loudly. We have both the regular mouse and the trackpoint mouse there.
If I may make a humble suggestion here, CJ. When I am typing, I’m annoyed by my touchpad as much as everyone else here. My Toshiba, which is a giant, has no trackpoint mouse. Is is sad that I remember when they developed those? Or how about those little pen mice that had the tiny little ball in them? Now I’m addicted to my laser mouse, but it still messes with me to switch back and forth. My slow creativity/type rate is made far worse when I have to reach.
My solution? I turn off my touchpad altogether and use hotkeys. I adore hot keys. Not only do they save me valuable time, but they come in handy when someone brings in their sick computer with no mouse… or with my job, but I won’t get into that now. Here’s microsoft’s guide to shortcut keys, http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/2503b91d-d780-4c80-8f08-2f48878dc5661033.mspx . You probably know all that already, but I hope it helps.
Sadly, I never understood what the hell that rubber thing was, and never used it. I actually had to wiki to see what a pointing stick was. I may be typical of your standard laptop user, which is why so many laptops no longer come with them. My HP laptop which I love love love came with a fingerprint reader and webcam, but no tracking point… so I think we can see the overall trend. 🙂
I’m not so sure it’s a trend to be without. Almost all Lenovos (IBM) come with them, the high end business machines for Dell do, Toshiba has just started offering them (may their use spread). Some Acers. But they are so incredibly much faster that if you hindbrain-type, they’re very, very useful.
Compared to ‘type of pointing device,’ which is about like saying “Do you really want a keyboard?”—and which is not even in the USA ‘choose your computer’ questions—the color, key-lighting, camera yes/no, bluetooth, DVR, HD, even the modem are ALL omissible. If you can’t input to the machine without cursing the input device at every step, thought, and move, you are paying a bunch of money just to raise your blood pressure.
The German site is quite useful: I can put in the 3 things that are dealbreakers with a new machine.
I’m interested in only 3 things: the track stick, the memory capacity, (both of which are set in stone)—and the OS (changeable, within limits).
That brings it down to 2 items that decide whether my money goes to the US or to China…and since the US manufacturers want to double the price of the machine for including a trackpoint, it doesn’t look good for US business.
Dell is going down by the stern, I fear—the user site is full of really angry, angry people. The only thing good I can say about my computer of choice for the last 20 years is that I can take it apart and repair it myself. But since I am maxed out on memory and the programs are getting hungrier, it’s bye-bye Dell, I fear. Before now I’d have recommended them, but I no longer can.
I’ve messed with a neural impulse actuator and you’ll want that I bet after you try it. They’ve got 11 channels now, you can map a lip purse to the right for EOL, to the left for BOL, kiss motion for -> etc, etc. Sounds strange I know but it’s pretty easy to get used to. Expensive now but 24mos or so and it’s an easily affordable add-on to any laptop.
Yeah, I’ve been waiting for something like that: my ideal would track eye movement: land the cursor precisely where I’m looking; and I know it exists, but mega-pricey, and not that accurate yet. I’ll watch this one with interest. It’d be particularly good in the intimate environment of a laptop with internal camera.
You know … you might give a trackball a chance. I know, I know: you’ll have to remove your hand from the home keys. However: how much mousing do you do whilst typing? I know that, for myself, I’ve shifted to an external keyboard and find that I don’t actually need the mouse all that much – particularly when I’ve gotten myself comfortable in an easy-chair and am “just” typing. This is particularly true when I’m typing in something without an annoying spell-check application, to highlight all of my typos as I’m working (another time-suck: spell-checking while writing). I’ve used the TrackMan Marble for many years, and have found that it’s easily carried to a chair, and doesn’t need any surface, so it can be propped on your belly (yes – strange, I know) while you’ve got the keyboard in your lap. It works for me, and I daresay that I’m on the computer enough to have formed a distinct opinion (probably on the keyboard/mouse 12 hours per day).
All of that said: you may also give an ergonomic keyboard a try. They tend to boost words-per-minute by a significant amount (some studies say 5 wpm, some 15). It’s something, plus they’re way easier to replace than the internal keyboard, when they go bad.
It’s the next-best thing, definitely. Once in the beginning of laptops, there was one that had a trackball where the touchpad is now, and I’d go for it if I couldn’t get my touchpoint.
I’m leaning somewhat toward not getting a new computer until this one implodes. Can’t really afford it right now. And I’m pressed for memory, and maxed out, but there are work-arounds I can do. One of my big, big problems is my genealogy program, my hobby, which has a main data file pushing a meg, like 940,000 bytes. But if I create a copy, then blitz half the tree, and work with 2 to 8 separate trees, I can get more room. Sigh. Hard disk is another problem. We’re networked, so I scatter backups about like crazy, but I could go with more room.
So the pointing device isn’t what’s driving the need for a new computer; and it’s only a hobby, for gosh sakes, even if it is business-useful research (where do I get my ideas? my ancestors were scoundrels and pirates)—but not justifiable in terms of expense…unless I aim myself not at the pretty HP Jane got, but at a refurb Lenovo, which would give me all of the above, and their refurb discount is far deeper than Dell’s.
I think in the back of my mind is the “OMG what if they phase out the trackpoint entirely” thought. I try to keep up with the tech so if they ever do lose their minds and leave that tech, I’ll have a computer for a number of years. The main thing it would affect would be, yes, my writing. I can cope, with other apps, but it would just make a major dent in my writing, and that’s what scares me.
Weird. I can never understand people who like trackpoints. I’m a touch-typist, have been since I was a child, pretty much, and I no longer even like “real” mice—just touchpads for me. I can vaguely understand the appeal of a trackball, though.
Yes, the occasional accidental thumb hit is annoying, but touchpads are to me the closest to direct brain control of the mouse.