Letter to Mr HP – ProBook 4320s a lesson in how to make a great laptop…. and then ruin it.

Dear Mr HP,

Well done Mr HP – ProBook 4320s looks good!

I love your current model of the 4320s laptop – its a great combination of weight and size, performance with its core i3 processor - and even though this is the baby of the core-i range who ever thought that you’d see four cores in a laptop!

It all seems a bit Buck-Rogers to someone who started with a BBC micro.

Nice screen, plenty of ram, suitably solid build, very usable keyboard, Windows 7 runs beautifully on it and once you work out how to open it up with its new fangled all-from-the-front-through-the-keyboard access stuff easy to upgrade it with bigger drives, ram and so on. It hibernates, sleeps without complaint, wireless is solid - all the things that a laptop should do.

But.

How did the worst touchpad in laptop history get past the usability testers, quality control engineers and anyone who used it before it went to production?

No Mr HP – this is not how you make a touchpad!

It makes the laptop almost useless as a lap-top – you have to have a mouse or other external pointer to get work done on it.

It has integrated buttons which are part of the touch-pad area – its possible that I’m missing the point about this what with all the Windows 7 multi-touch stuff but it is impossible whilst actually using this on your lap or a desk to avoid brushing against the ‘buttons’

This causes the mouse to jump, or for you to do a click-stretch/select move which is hopeless – you have to develop some kind of magic finger-levitate/hover action -

Thumb-levitate magic!

There are enough options in the driver panel to make your eyes-bleed but I cant find anything that will make the button areas be just buttons and not some useless button/touch combo area.

Mr HP, please try harder next time.