Inspirational Technology

Desktop Pro Natural Keyboard

The last couple days I've been having some pain in my wrist and after examining how I was typing I decided it was time to switch back to a split keyboard. I had one of the original Microsoft Natural Keyboards several years ago, but ended up giving it to my girlfriend at the time. I liked it, but for some reason ended up preferring a regular keyboard again, don't remember why. Anyway, today I wanted to get another Natural Keyboard and it turns out Microsoft has really screwed up the product line. From what I can see they currently offer three different natural keyboards and all of them have compromises. Either they're PS2 only, have little tiny cursor keys, or are bundled with a mouse. I ended up with a Microsoft Optical Desktop Pro which is a combo keyboard mouse deal. I'm not too enthused about having to buy the mouse, but there was no option. I needed a USB keyboard with normal sized arrow keys and this is the only one Microsoft makes anymore. I also didn't want a wireless keyboard as batteries are just an extra expense for no real benefit. I never move the keyboard off the desk. Ugg, oh well. Anyway, the keyboard itself is pretty decent and the drivers for Mac OS X seem to work pretty well.

I spent about an hour remapping all the special keys on the keyboard and I think they make a great addition. You can pretty much program them to do whatever you want. With the media control center on the keyboard you also don't lose any of the functionality of the standard Apple Pro keyboard. Actually you pick up quite a bit like being able to hit play and having it launch iTunes and start playing automatically plus easily skip forward and backward. That's a great feature that I had previously been using PTHiTunesNotifier to provide via multikey hot keys. I'm actually a little surprised, but Microsoft did a great job of integrating the keyboard with Mac OS X.

The bad thing about this combo is that the mouse isn't all that great. It's designed to be usable in either hand and suffers a poorly designed shape because of this. My initial thought was that I would just keep using my Logitech Cordless MouseMan Optical and hook the Microsoft mouse to my Tablet PC, unfortunately, the mouse and keyboard share the same receiver so that's not possible. So I either end up ditching the Microsoft mouse and keep using the Logitech, or I use the Microsoft mouse and hook the Logitech to my tablet. I'd just as soon not have the mouse at all, it's very disappointing that they only sell this as a bundle.

Another small complaint about this is that the receiver is rather large and has an extra PS2 connector on the end. This isn't a huge deal really, it just conflicts with my desire for clean design.

Overall if you need a split keyboard for a Macintosh running OS X, the Optical Desktop Pro isn't a bad choice. It's just unfortunate that the price is inflated by the inclusion of an inferior quality mouse. Oh yeah, the whole point of buying this thing was to relax my wrists. They're definitely feeling much better now.