I’ve been having problems typing with the keyboard built into my laptop (it irritates some nerves in my forearms, which causes pain in my thumbs and, to a lesser degree, my index and middle fingers), so I bought a Goldtouch adjustable ergonomic USB keyboard.
It arrived today, so I thought I’d write about my first impressions. First, though, I’d like to digress. I found out that it had arrived via the ‘track item’ function on Amazon, which told me not only that it had been delivered, but also that it had been left at my front door. I went out to the porch to get it, and I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that I used some extended, distributed portion of the technology that is the internet – amazon.com, fedex.com, etc… – to acquire the very local knowledge that my new keyboard was sitting twenty or thirty feet away from me in a box.
Anyway, it seems pretty nice so far. The keys are nicely responsive, and the adjustability of the keyboard will be very useful, I think. There is one temporary downside, though, this being that fact that the ‘b’ key is on the left-hand partition of the keyboard. Apparently, when given the option of using either hand to type ‘b’, I use my right hand. I’m already adapting, but every time there is a ‘b’ to type, I either ‘type it’ with my right hand (i.e., I push the empty spot on just to the left of the ‘n’ key on the right-hand partition) and then type it with my left, or I pause and think about where it is and then type it with my left.
There are a few other small differences between the old and new keyboards, but none that are particularly notable. Assuming this thing actually helps with my arm and hand pain, any minor inconveniences caused by different spatial arrangements of auxiliary keys will be well worth overcoming.