Datahand first impressions

2005/02/26

Categories: GeekStuff

This is a cool gizmo. It isn’t perfect, but it’s quite nice. I’m using it in Dvorak mode.

The keyboard has 40 finger keys, and 10 thumb keys; the thumb keys are mostly mode switches.

There are three modes. Normal mode has letters and common punctuation. NAS (numbers and symbols) mode is self-explanatory. Mouse mode has mouse movement, arrow keys, and function keys.

For reasons not clear to me, there’s an unbound key in NAS mode, and no hyphen. I remapped this.

The adjustments are pretty flexible, but I wouldn’t mind a tiny bit more freedom of movement for them. Still impressive. The left shift is maybe too sensitive for my taste. On the other hand… This is a seriously cool toy, and I anticipate a lot of comfy typing on it in days to come. I can touch-type on it, just very slowly, but I very rarely need to look at their charts.

More to come when I’ve had it more than a day.