The keyboard my lovely wife got me gave up. The the last of the three hooks holdin the space bar straight snapped, making it no longer go straight up and down. It still works, technically, but requires a slight wrist contortion to operate it. Not much, but enough to start hurting in less than an hour which, given how much I type, definitely won’t do. Back on my wired K120 until I settle on a suitable replacement.

It held up for 7.5 months, about 2500 hours of typing/mouse movement, 1.5 million keystrokes (extrapolated from logs). Being a dome-style keyboard rated at 1M/key, it hasn’t quite gotten to that, but I may be harder than average on keys and with it being wireless and small I move it a lot (repositioning to spread strain, putting it down and picking it up, carrying it with me if I’m just standing up to get something, etc). I suppose it held up admirably enough. Some end-of-life notes:

Pros:

I like the wireless touchpad/keyboard combo concept. I mostly type with it on my lap, arms straight down my sides bent at the elbows hip level. The touchpad puts the “mouse” there too. No muscles besides the underarm finger actuators have to ever move, and moving the rest is fairly even in terms of directions and not heavily biased toward holing my arms up in front of me (countered by shoulders and cascading down the back straining backwards to avoid the whole human tipping forward). It’s not a free pass to not stand up for two, four, eight, ten hours at a time – muscles still stiffen up from disuse – but it does seem significantly better than other positoins. I thought that was a rouge idea, but I’ve been told the eregonomics guys actually back me on that, what I’d been told about “best practices” during the 80s and 90s has been revised significantly.

The wireless connection is rock solid. I’m talking three disconnects from purchase to EOL, and two were from the batteries running out. I’ve sporadically attempted to switch to wireless every few years since 94-95 and it’s always been more trouble than it’s worth. I’m extraordinarily picky about it, I don’t just expect it to work but to let me immerse, to have my body accept it as an extension of itself to the point where I feel slightly odd when it’s not there. Even monthly issues is too much for that. This keyboard made it in.

Cons:

Slightly smaller than a full-size. I got used to it, but I’m not exaclty loving it. I have big hands.

Wierd layout. The arrow-keys plus ctrl-shift-enter jam in the lower right corner is annoying. Function keys default to media functions (can thankfully be changed). Again, it’s possible to live with, but I’d prefer not to have to.

No number pad. This, like the key size, might be a necessary compromise for portabillity and to avoid needing occasional side-to-side arm movement (forcing a slight arm lift) by smaller humans. Usually no big, but sometimes I’d grab a wired one when there was a lot of numbers.

All in all it was pretty good, but it’s not the holy grail of keyboards. I’m not buying another one right away at least, while it’s several steps in the right direction I think there can and will be better options.