Is the ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II legitimately better?

[Cookie Guru]

Lenovo's site advertises a "ThinkPad TrackPoint II Keyboard" P/N 4Y40X49493. I'm curious if this is genuinely better than the first gen product.

Several years ago I owned two ThinkPad Compact Bluetooth Keyboards P/N 03X8697. The first one had an incredibly annoying habit of dropping the connection. It was made especially worse because when holding down a key, because the keyboard it sends a single "key down" scan code, followed by a "key up" scan code when the key is released instead of a continuous "key still down" signal. So if you were typing CTRL + W and the connection dropped before the keys were released, the host OS would think you're holding that combo down and close every tab in the browser. This happened several times. The second was DOA and was torn down here.

I replaced it with a K400 which worked well enough but has since developed its own issues. So I'm curious if the gen 2 keyboard solved the connection dropouts or introduced something new.

[heilong]

I was using a ThinkPad Wired USB Keyboard with TrackPoint (0B47190) and found it quite nice. Not as nice as the classic 7-row keyboards, in terms of layout and the shape of the TrackPoint buttons.
Looks like the new keyboard has the same layout, but they switched from MicroUSB to USB-C - a very welcome move - and added Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity and a rechargeable battery.
Sounds pretty nice. I wish Lenovo made a 7-row external keyboard. I really don't see why they don't. On a laptop the available space is limited, they wanted a bigger touchpad, so they switched from 7 rows to 6.
But on an external keyboard, that doesn't have a touchpad, they are not really limited in space, and could easily make it 7-row...