My boss has been informed that laptop with a Touchpoint is a "condition of employment" - I cannot imagine working without one. I see people trying to work with touchpads and it just makes me cry...
Sample Image: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/think...
Edit: Apparently Wikipedia imaginatively calls it a "pointing stick" :> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick
Are there any models (of any brand) with a particular good touchpoint feel?
Edit: http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/looking-for-nub-best-and-w... Apparently, the Lenovo one is supposed to be good. Bummer, I don't like it at all. It seems to switch from moving slowly to moving really fast at a rather unpredictable spot, which makes it hard to make precise movements in a fast way. You usually overshoot about two times if you're trying to click in a small area.
Edit: LOL, it also only just occured to me that using the trackpoint with your index finger is the best option (I was using my thumb before). Work a tiny bit better (still not very well honestly).
I've used it on T410, T420, T450, T530, T61, T23.
You do have to set up acceleration and speed to suit you (takes a while I assume), and set them up differently than you would for a mouse.
I will absolutely agree that learning curve is higher for trackpoint and that it's less intuitive than touchpad - but it's a bit like Vi/Emacs vs MS Notepad - one is immediately intuitive, the other rewards you for initial investment. I think giving a random person a touchpad and a trackpoint, and asking them to immediately do something, touchpad will win. But I also firmly believe the achievable ceiling is higher on trackpoint.
I cannot imagine using it with my thumb!!
Interestingly, while I'm right handed and use my mouse with my right hand, I use my trackpoint with left index finger, thumb over buttons... but I think that's a quirk of mine and not a generalized thing.
Trackballs, touchpads, mice, even a lot of esoteric solutions such as eye-trackers do. Even Valve made a controller with touchpads to work around this problem.
I find them too slow for long distances too, and they tend not to be accurate enough if you increase the speed.
I had a couple of friends at university looking forward to have some of those, but they admitted (on their own, while presented with the above argumentation) it was for the "premium/professional" look of those rather than usability.
So,in my highly subjective experience, this input method is highly unusable when used as a mouse. I wonder how you perceive these issues? Maybe I am just using them the wrong way?
Edit: One thing I wish more laptops had is a third button, though, if only for interacting with tabs/link in the browser, and copy/paste. You can also use a touch pad with your thumb quite accurately (tap to click), but it's a bit awkward.
As to the rest though, I have exactly the same complaints about touchpad - lack of speed, accuracy, etc... it just boggles my mind how people can put up with it (especially on smaller laptops/netbooks).
Largely I imagine therefore it's whatever you're used to. That being said, and for whatever this extremely biased and small sample is worth, there's nobody I know (friends, family, co-workers, fellow geeks) who can beat me on either speed or precision if they use a touchpad and I use trackpoint. I can pinpoint things down to a pixel (can never do it with touchpad, regardless of time), drag & drop with ease and I can move from one corner of the screen to the other in less than a second in one motion.
[couldn't care less about "professional" look - nobody I know would be impressed... if anything, most people will just look at me in bewilderment/pity when I try to use the touchpad :]
I'm willing to admit that it's largely due to whatever a person is accustomed to.
However, I still have to see somebody use Touchpad in a way that doesn't make me cringe as to how long anything takes... maybe I need to find a more proficient friend :)