Keyboard and Trackpad
The Graphite LG5 manages to cram in a 35W CPU and a discrete graphics solution, but that's easy; getting a great keyboard to fit inside a compact chassis is the difficult bit.
With so little room to work with, a few keys have been reduced in size, including the arrow keys, both shift keys and a very small escape key. There's consequently an adjustment period - it took us a while to get comfortable with either the left or right shift keys - but the main QWERTY layout is good, with well-spaced keys that are just about big enough.
Each letter has a good amount of travel, and though the tray is plastic, it doesn't flex too easily. Strangely, our biggest gripe isn't the size of the keyboard, it's the squared edge of the palm rest. Any user with big hands will find that their palms extend past the rest and balance uncomfortably on the edge, which really needs to be rounded for comfort.
What's interesting, or indeed unusual, is that our review laptop arrived without any hotkey software pre-installed, making it difficult to tell if the keyboard's various shortcut keys were working as intended. Users who prefer on-screen notifications for items such as brightness and volume can download the required utility manually from the Clevo website.
Similarly, the trackpad exhibited limited functionality because Scan chooses not to install the optional Synaptics software.
Out of the box, the pad functions as a single-touch device with dedicated left and right buttons. It's responsive enough, but the textured rubber surface feels sticky and unproductive; almost as if it's trying to slow you down. It's worth noting, also, that this is technically a multi-touch pad, but in order to gain that extra ability we had to download the Synaptics driver manually. Worth doing, as two-finger scrolling and pinch-to-zoom works well.
