Y7 keyboard

I'm currently in Japan and would like to buy a Y7 but they have the Japanese international layout keyboards here. I think I remember in the past (I could be wrong), Dynamism and some other companies have sold the Y2 with English layout keyboards but now I only see them being sold with the same Japanese layout keyboards but without the Japanese characters. I really prefer the English layout placement of the parenthesis, apostrophe, etc. It seems like it would still be physically possible to swap the keyboards for an English layout keyboard on the Y7 so I'm wondering why I haven't been able to find much info on this. The notebooks are significantly cheaper here in Japan so I would like to just swap keyboards if possible. Any info would be very much appreciated, thanks.

 

It should be easy. If you can't find it anywhere else, you can always call heartlandsi and see how much they charge.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, I looked up heartlandsi and may just eventually order a keyboard from them. Do you know of any tutorials on how to remove the keyboard on the Y series notebooks? I figure it should be similar on the Y2/Y5/Y7 but I haven't been able to find any instructions.

 

Hi, I own a y7 for 3 month now. Had it deliverd from japan with the jap 106 key kbd, without the jap characters. In the begining I had a little bit of trouble getting used to it but one week later I had no more problems. The layout i pretty much identical to the US kbd, with minor exceptions. Besides, two major advantiges of the jap kbd over the us one on panasonic laptops are. 1 he big "RETURN" key, right there where it is supposed to be, rather than a slim return and pageup/page down keys to its right on the us kbd. On jap kbd PgUp, Down Home And End are on the arrow keys when Fn is pressed down - very intuitif to use.

There are also 3 additional keys around the space bar (which is smaller, but that's not much of a handicap) that serve for jap writing, but you can preprogram them easily to do pretty much what ever yyou wan. I use them to write accentuated letters for french and to switch tabs and do back/forward in mozilla firefox.

So my addvice is: Buy the beast, try it out and you'll get used to it before you find a replacement keyboard. Besides, changing it will void you warranty, and that is apetty, knowing the quality of pana support
cheers