★★★★★ 5
Wonderful keyboard, VERYuseful programmable buttons aplenty. Only problem: Intermittent connectivity problem with wireless unit.
Color: Black
I really love this keyboard, having used "ergonomic" keyboards for a great many years now, and using nothing else.
The design is really nice, with the split keyboard being an increasingly rare thing to find these days. Almost no models made by anyone offer such a design, but even if there was more competition of this type, I still think this keyboard is great.
The programmable buttons (MANY of them) are a huge plus. You can program most of them to do all kinds of things, including opening often-used documents or websites for you, or running macros you write.
The buttons that are intended for specific purposes, though, are so well thought-out that I leave most of the button assignments as they are. For example, the buttons dedicated for increasing, decreasing, or muting the speaker/headphone volume are VERY useful very often. And the calculator button also gets a lot of use. Others are the same: very well-thought-out standard assignments doing things I do often (and that presumably most people do often), and once you get used to the fact that now you have a button that does what you want (at first, you'll do it the slower way requiring many more button presses &/or mouse pointer clicks), this keyboards full functionality really shines through for you, and you can't imagine how you could use anything else!
The removable palm rest is another great feature, by the way. Since I use this on my lap, and the bottom of that thing isn't comfortable at all that way, I'm very happy it comes off. And it goes on and off very quickly and easily, in case you want to move it back and forth between a non-organic surface and your lap.
The only problem I have with this keyboard in its wireless version (I have both cabled and wireless ones) is that with many positions I get in, even when the keyboard is VERY close to the receiver plugged into the USB jack on the front of my computer, it won't work at all many times. But when the keyboard is in other positions that have NO line of sight to the receiver, it works fine. It's very particular that way, with some orientations that seem like they'd make for very easy connectivity being impossible to use, while other orientations/distances that seem like they wouldn't work work just fine. Go figure. But once you learn its oddities, you can work around that by moving the keyboard and/or the receiver plugged into the computer so that it works. I do still find it annoying that it seems like the most comfortable positions I want to be in often seem impossible to make work, even with very close proximity. Using the wired version, of course, removes this problem entirely. But I think that the connectivity of the wireless version should not be so touchy and idiosyncratic, and would describe it as a "design flaw." I would have to say that, overall, this isn't enough to warrant deducting a star, though.
Overall, though, I'd say it's a great keyboard, and highly recommend it.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2013

