Review: Pocketop Keyboard - Page 2

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	Review: Pocketop Keyboard - Page 2	By Jørgen Sundgot, Tuesday 5 November 2002

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Tippity tap

Moving over to the keyboard itself, I have for the most part praise to give. Despite key travel, spacing and size being less than what you'd expect from a conventional laptop keyboard, it's after a period of adjustment very comfortable to write on. After spending 15 minutes of continous typing I was going at near full speed, and as much as I miss the inclusion of a top row of number keys I prefer having the keyboard at such a small size. Through the combination of Function, Punctuation and Num/Numlock keys, all necessary buttons are easily reached - and the inclusion of four double-function shortcut keys in the upper right corner of the keyboard dot the i. My only grief is that the Delete key has been placed to the right of the right arrow button in the lower right corner; not only is this a highly unusual place to put it, but it's far too easy to move fingers one button too many to the right when you're looking for the arrows.

Ill: Pocketop

On the brighter side, it's easy to enter text macros for insertion through a combination of the Cmd button and any A-Z button, while a number of the common shortcuts present in the Pocket PC platform such as Ctrl-Z for undo, Ctrl-C for copy and soforth are supported too. In addition, pressing Fn-O triggers a character map which allows for insertion of Mathematics, Greek, Dingbat and miscellaneous other characters.

I've spent considerable time typing on the Pocketop keyboard, and I can't really find any major errors with it apart from the fact that the drivers crashed my e740 test device a couple of times - but whether this was related to screen rotation or keyboard input I can't say, since screen rotation had to be enabled all the time the case of the e740. Installation of drivers was however smooth and painless, as was working with the screen rotation software - even though it requires soft resets each time it does a 90 degree rotation, which can be severely annoying if you frequently use applications that don't reflow when the screen rotates, leaving buttons that need to pressed and other things out of the visible area.

Conclusion

When it comes to usability and tactile feedback, the Pocketop keyboard is performing far better than I expected it to. A couple of small, but ingenious feats relating to the stand and hinge systems contribute to drawing up the total impression which is already very good, and the fact that the keyboard is likely to continue being compatible with a range of devices promises good for those who are tired of replacing their portable keyboard when buying a new device. It's small, it's light, and you don't have to worry about broken connectors - and it doesn't eat batteries like crazy, either.

The Pocketop Keyboard is available from Pocketop's website for $99 USD, as well as other major eTailers in various markets.

What's positive: Sturdy, good performance and tactile feedback, battery efficient, anti-slide rubber knobs
What's negative: Takes time getting used to, some software crashes

Overall: