People who know me, know that I freak when some company ‘improves’ the keyboard layout by tilting the ins/del/home/end/pgup/pgdn block (ie putting it vertically instead of horizontally) or by moving down the PrtScr/ScrollLock/Pause row to make room for useless Power/Standby Buttons at the top, usually putting the ‘Power’ button in place of the ‘Pause/Break’ button which I have a tendency to hit quite often when working with Linux consoles. You can imagine my frustration everytime Windows shuts down thanks to me hitting CTRL+Power on such a crappy input device.
Anyway, I just discovered this and I must say that that contraption must be one of the worst keyboards ever to pollute the face of the earth! Not only does it have no numeric pad and none of the aforementioned blocks that I could see, no it is also missing the normal function keys like the escape key! Yes it does sport backlighting (my Logitech G15 has that too, even if it doesn’t autosense the light in my room or my presence), is wireless and has quite a share of silly multimedia buttons, but if you ask me, that doesn’t make it what they call the ‘Ultimate Keyboard’. Quite on the contrary, I think that this abomination of hardware rather deserves the name ‘Ultimate Typing Nightmare’ and I don’t care what their marketing department throws at me, I won’t buy it!
2008-12-12 Update: Microsoft seems to have moved things around on their website. The product I’m referring to in this text is this one.
/signed 100%
I think it may have some potential, due to its “Marriage of Performance and Style”TM, “Cutting Edge Design”TM and “Authentic Metal Accents”TM, in a “Tastaturweitwurf”TM-competition. ;)