I went shopping for a new laptop for my brother this past weekend. It was nuts – Circuit City didn’t have the display model for the one that we wanted to buy and they would not open the box to let us look at the one that we were interested in. My brother didn’t care, but I was a touch perturbed by it all. It’s the little things that really make a difference to a real road warrior and they wouldn’t let us check those things. It turns out that I was right to want to check – it was set up as a left handed laptop. What I mean by that is that the power was on the right hand side where it’s in the way of the mouse and the USB ports and the like were on the left hand side where you have to run cables from the mouse all the way around the rest of the box to plug it in. This would be great if me or my brother were actually left handed but we are not.
I don’t know of other people think the same way that I do about that, but it drives me nuts when I see that type of setup. I think that laptop manufactures should put left handed or right handed on the box so we know when they put all of the ports on the sides of the box. The laptop that I’m using right now (Fujitsu T4020 Tablet) has a USB on the left and one on the back. The one on the back is obviously for the mouse. The power is also on the back. This means that it can be ambidextrous. I guess that’s one of the differences between a $550.00 laptop (what my brother bought) and a $2000 tablet (what I bought).
I wonder if the manufacturers consciously think about these issues…