Good Thing You Don’t Need to Use the Trackpad Much on a Notebook

Sean Hollister at The Verge reviews the new Dell XPS 13, and had some serious problems with the trackpad:

The problem is that the Cypress drivers are all over the place. I tried three different versions of the software and manually tweaked every setting I could, and couldn’t find a single combination that both allowed for smooth two-finger scrolling and decent palm rejection. The pad is sensitive enough and close enough to the keyboard that it’s almost impossible not to hit it as you type, and the software’s not always smart enough to keep you from jumping a line when you do. There’s no way to easily and quickly turn off the touchpad while you’re typing, and scrolling can be exceptionally jerky, too. Also, no matter which version of the software I used, the Cypress pad was sluggish to respond to gestures like scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, and tap-to-click, which meant that the laptop only did what I told it to do after a noticable delay. Eventually, I gave up and switched to a mouse. I suspect you’d do the same.

That’s pretty much everything wrong with Windows PCs in a nutshell: dicking around with “drivers” and settling for a crummy experience anyway.

★ Tuesday, 6 March 2012