I imagine that the keyboard real estate is a hard business to be involved in, these days. Keyboards tend to get tiny, as devices with keyboards are getting smaller, and small devices like cell phones are being fitted with fully functional keyboards. One of the major complaints of the average Asus Eee PC user, besides the small screen size - an issue that is being tackled with the new version as we speak - seems to be the awkwardly small keyboard.
Then why, one wonders, do all keyboard manufacturers all over the world put utterly useless keys on the board? I think the most useless part of my laptop, besides its 56k modem (and to be honest, I’m pretty sure that if I would try hard enough, I would be able to think of a situation where a 56k modem comes in handy), is the insert key. Is there one living soul that can explain to me what it’s use is? The only use I can see for it, is luring you into touching it while hitting the backspace, and subsequently sending two full sentences to sentence valhalla before you realise what’s going on. And of course, you wrote those sentences half an hour earlier, so you don’t remember them too well, and everything you substitute them with doesn’t really flow nicely.
I think ages ago, when a mouse was still something you tried to catch with a rusty piece of metal and a bit of cheese, it might have made sense to use the ‘overtype’ mode. In those times, you couldn’t easily select a bit of text, and type something else. So if your alinea didn’t flow nicely, you would go to the start of it, hit the insert key, and start allover. But those times are over! Now, we have more than 2 or 4 colours on our screen. We don’t use floppy disks anymore. 640 k was clearly not enough for everybody, and guess what: we don’t need the insert key anymore.
So I humbly suggest to all keyboard designers in the world, to find a good alternative use for the insert key. Even a smiley key would get used more often on my keyboard…
