Alongside all their travails with the Playstation 3, the audio CD rootkit disaster and the fact that a Korean manufacturer (Samsung) is in the process of taking over their former position as Asia’s leading innovative tech company, Sony now has the dubious distinction of being the manufacturer of a series of high-end laptops with the world’s worst keyboard.

There may be laptops out there with keyboards as bad as or even worse than that of Sony’s new Vaio SZ series, but I doubt whether any of them are in the over $2000/€2000 price range.

This keyboard is a lot worse than just plain bad. It brings the art of bad keyboards to a whole new level of atrocity, plumbing depths never before visited by any reputable hardware manufacturer. All the reviewers who gave these laptops Editor’s Choice ratings clearly didn’t try to do any serious typing on this thing.

To be fair, the rest of the SZ series’ hardware certainly deserves all the awards and more — that’s what makes it so frustrating. If it wasn’t for the keyboard this would be the Windows laptop I would buy, if I was going to buy a Windows laptop, and I wouldn’t stop to argue about the price: A brilliant 13.3″ screen, 1.6Kg, carbon fiber shell, the ability to switch between integrated graphics for battery life and a real graphics card for power, 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of memory, 120GB hard drive, optional 7-hour battery and much more.

Unfortunately, if you’re a touch typist it’s not possible to do any work on Vaio SZ laptops without an external keyboard.

Yesterday I spent an entire evening setting up a Vaio SZ for a friend. The initial experience of the keyboard generated immediate strong dislike and in the course of the evening the emotion turned into a deep and abiding hatred.

The keys are flat and made of cheap, slippery, shiny plastic — it feels little brittle and strangely oily, like the same kind of material used for the toys in Crackerjack boxes and Kinder Surprise Eggs. They are strangely dimensioned and subjectively all in the wrong places. The tactile feel is non-existent, you might just as well be pretending to type on a tabletop.

All this sounds bad but the plain facts don’t provide any idea of just how frustrating it is to try to type on this thing. It’s as though a team of experts had worked for months to find a design and layout that would create the maximum possible grief and error rate. For example, you don’t just constantly hit the wrong keys — the wrong keys you hit are almost inviarably combinations that make your software do something nasty and un-undoable or close the browser window with the editing box containing the text you just spent an hour composing.

If you’re a two-finger typist who never takes his/her eyes from the keyboard you might just be able to work with this thing. Otherwise, look elsewhere (unless you’re Saint Sebastian, then you’ll really enjoy it).