
HP Mini 2140 trackpad
There, I feel better having said that. I have the great opportunity to play with use a lot of different netbooks and notebooks and one of the common features that most share is the trackpad. The trackpad is that small slippery little pad that replaces the mouse on mobile computers. They haven’t changed much until recently and they are all pretty much the same, and they all drive me batty.
I have never been a fan of the trackpad as they’ve never felt right to use. I’m one of the rare users who actually liked the old ThinkPad nubbin, that little stick of a mouse that moved the cursor all over the screen. I could use those with a fair bit of precision and it always felt right to do so. That’s just not the case with trackpads, especially now that they’ve shrunk to ridiculous sizes.
I don’t know if we blame the netbook for the shrunken trackpad or if they were just evolving that way anyway. Look at any netbook and many notebooks today and you see a sliver-like trackpad beneath the keyboard. Not much bigger than an inch wide and even shorter in the up/down direction, these little trackpads don’t feel right to use at all. Maybe it’s a mental thing, my mind just can’t make the jump from the 1.5 inch trackpad to the 10, 12 or even 17-inch screen where the cursor lives.
I feel like I am constantly swooping my finger over the trackpad trying to move the cursor over, over, over to the edge of the screen. Throw in an up/down swoop on top of the side-to-side dance and it just isn’t normal. Give me a nubbin any time and I’ll show you a cursor that practically leaps all around the screen. Oh yes.

Lenovo W700ds trackpad
The bigger the laptop the worse the little trackpad affects my usage. I can’t express how frustrating it has been using the giant Lenovo w700ds with the itty-bitty trackpad it has. I try moving the cursor over the 17-inch screen and it’s a nightmare and then throw in the extra 10.6-inch screen on the side of the other one and I am rubbing my finger raw swooping the cursor all around. Thank goodness Lenovo includes a nubbin on the beast too.
That’s something I’d like to see done more often, leave the trackpad for those who for some reason like that method, just give me a nubbin too. I know I’m in the minority, most folks seem to like the trackpad for an input method. That’s fine just not for me. I never have liked them even before they started shrinking to ridiculous small sizes. In fact the oversized trackpad on the MacBooks are the first I have liked to use, probably because they are big enough and proportional to the screen size. Plus they have that cool multi-touch stuff going on.

MacBook trackpad
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