You know, you’d think the Macbooks were the only laptops with gee-whiz multitouch gestures – they certainly get all the press. But there’s multitouch on those lookallthesamedontthey Windows laptops too.
Synaptics, the company that makes trackpads more than plastic skating rinks for your fingers, has done a bang-up job. On my 11” Dell Inspiron, I have configured:
- Two-finger vertical and horizontal scrolling
- OS X Lion-like ‘reverse’ scrolling
- Fantastic one-finger circular scrolling for long-distance vertical and horizontal scrolling
- Standard pinch-to-zoom and twist-to-rotate
- Pointer ‘momentum’ to slide rapidly across the 1366×768 display
- ‘Tap Zones’ to configure each of the 4 corners of the touchpad as custom buttons (my touchpad’s bottom left corner is a ‘show desktop’ button)
- 3-finger flick left and right to go back and forth through photos and the browser
- 3 finger tap-and-hold to launch custom applications (Google Chrome for me)
But laptop manufacturers have let customers – and Synaptics – down with the size of their touchpads – these touchpads have remained the same size even as they became far mroe capable.
Compare the Macbook Air’s trackpad (10.46cm x 6.22 cm = 65.06cm2) to the Dell Inspiron’s (7.5cm x 3.8 cm = 28.5cm2) and you’ll see that the Macbook’s has 2.28 times the Inspiron’s surface area. Here’s how bad it is:
(Macbook image taken from GottaBeMobile)
Think of how much more joyful and fun it’d be to use your Windows laptop with a giant trackpad. If the design folks at Dell and Lenovo are using their own laptops, surely a trackpad thrice as large should be on the top of their agenda.