I've been a Lenovo man for the longest time, and I am currently running a T430s. I find it to be the best balance of physical size and computing power there is to find.
The left side of the laptop gets noticeably hot if you don't vacuum the CPU cooling exhaust regularly. It would've not been a problem, but you end up resting left wrist on a very warm spot. Also the left pinky lingers exactly over the CPU and gets dry and itchy if you try and run a poorly written WebGL demo. The keyboard itself is fine, though I've been using laptops as a primary machine for 10+ years, so YMMV.
I was afraid I wouldn't like it, but after using it for a couple of weeks I am very pleased with it. I think the island style mainly was implemented to allow for the keyboard backlight. That's a bonus for me since I work in low light from time to time. Backlight really helps then.
Also, the six rows things is no issue for me. I rarely se the extra keys anyways. The PrtSc placement perplexes me though.
Thanks – yes, the PrtSc key is a little…odd. I was wondering about the PgUp/Dn buttons as well, as they are in this stupid location where they absolutely don’t belong. Why do you find the keyboard backlight helpful? So far, I found the ThinkLight to be more flexible.
Guess I’ll wait a little longer and see what the future brings, hopefully a 4:3 notebook with seven full rows and no touchpad </dreaming>.
I can't speak for the T430S but the T430 has 2 levels of backlighting and then if I click function space 1 more time the backlighting goes off and the little lamp at the top of the screen turns on.
Hrm, that's what I feared. I was a proud owner of a [0] before this one, but even the Core i520M slowly gets…slow, especially one of the newer graphics chips would be wonderful sometimes.