What varmint gnawed off a hunk of my keyboard? When I recently opened a brand-new Sony VAIO--a desktop machine, not a space-hampered notebook--I immediately discovered that some mad genius had hacked off a couple of inches of width and "improved" what's left.

It's another grim event in the long, sad decline of the PC keyboard, a device that remains as important as ever despite all attempts to eliminate it with voice or stylus or to improve it by turning it big and wavy. On this particular model, the handy island of cursor-movers between letters and numbers has vanished. Instead, Sony stuck the arrow keys below and beside the right Shift key. Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End have migrated to those very same keys--provided you hold down a smallish Function key nestled between the Ctrl and Windows keys. Alt and all the keys to the right of the spacebar get downsized too. And poor Insert and Delete end up to the right of the function keys, about where you'd expect to find Scroll Lock and Pause.

When it comes to keyboards, consistency makes sense. Sitting down at a PC and getting to work without having to curse what's under your fingers is a genuine productivity booster. But increasingly we see all sorts of improvements that aren't.

Blame Microsoft for some of them. The primary function of Windows keys is to put the operating system's logo onto your keyboard--twice! Better idea: the key on the company's Office Keyboard that supplants the awkward Alt- Esc combination for toggling among programs. But Microsoft shoves this key onto a slab where it's out of easy reach.

Other sinister forces keep "improving" things in stupid ways. Some keys--including those on the bottom row and, on the new VAIOs, the arrow keys--have mysteriously turned convex. Never mind that concave keys are easier to hit, and your fingers don't slide off them.

Keyboard feel is pretty much a lost art. Everything I've tried lately has a dead, sticky touch, in part because just about everybody uses the cheapest possible technology. So I still peck away at the highly responsive keyboard that came with my now-long-dead Zenith computer 13 years ago. It's my only PC item of that vintage that's still usable every single day.

Small Gets Better

There's brighter news in small packages, now that even Handspring (home of Graffiti's inventors) has realized that pen input is too clunky for busy users. The folding Stowaway keyboard has a slim profile that may be the most ergonomic of all, and thumb-typing on RIM's Blackberry devices and Handspring's Treo phones is surprisingly easy. Digit Wireless's Fastap keyboard, which may show up in new handhelds, cleverly crams a key for each alphanumeric character into the same space as a phone keypad.

Don't get me started on laptop keyboards. Their touchpads have lately developed a new glitch: the incredible jumping cursor. I first ran into this phenomenon on Apple iBooks, but it's migrated to PC notebooks. The issue is simple: When one finger rests on a touchpad, the cursor shouldn't hop around if another finger brushes near or onto the pad's surface. This is a software problem. The logic should stipulate that if one finger is already on the pad, ignore any others. That's how it used to work. I guess nobody bothers to complain.

But why just fix it? How about shrinking the touchpad and swapping it with the Escape key? Then you can tout a keyboard that's "new and improved."

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