Laptop Keyboard Backlights Should Be Standard

When I worked at Nokia, I was given a Lenovo Thinkpad as my work laptop. I don’t recall the exact model or anything, it was merely a work machine. However, one thing that really stuck out to me as a brilliant feature was a little tiny light nestled into the bezel around the display. With a hotkey combination, you could turn this tiny light on to illuminate your keyboard. This was extremely helpful when typing at night, or in other dark situations.

As a result, I purchased a backlit keyboard for my office, to plug into my Dell XPS M1330. There’s not much to it – I don’t do those fancy-pants keyboards – it’s just an external keyboard that has a bright blue backlight. Instantly evenings became more productive (which was good, because Mrs. Guru was working nights at the time) and my eyes felt less strained.

However, now I have a netbook, and I like to work from wherever I want to work. Unfortunately, I do not take this backlit keyboard with me, especially since my Asus EeePC 1000HE has a keyboard built in. The only laptops that I know of that have a backlit keyboard built in are the MacBook Pros and a few Windows gaming laptops. For whatever reason, it simply isn’t a common feature, but it should be.

There are a few mods, though none for my Asus EeePC 1000HE, unfortunately, since it has a rather unique keyboard. I wonder how much extra it would cost netbook and laptop manufacturers to include this feature in future models? Even cooler would be the ability to change the color of the backlight, through a special application on the computer, though I would gladly accept a single color, as well.