There's something ... 'scholastic' about the air as summer starts to show its signs of ending. Somethin that makes you want to sort of just sit down, read a book, get some work done, not at a desk -- but a coffee shop, the comfier seating in a library. And 'get to work'.
For me that means plopping out the tablet, and I do love my tablets that have the keyboard folio (OnePlus Pad 2 review inbound shortly), but sometimes I like to take my Pixel Tablet for a walk and it doesn't have that luxury. I've looked at different portable bluetooth keyboards and none of them really work - they're always so lacking, or the trackpad sucks. So what to do?
Well, I came across this nice 'little' ergonomic keyboard from Kensington; the Pro Fit® Ergo KB675 EQ TKL Rechargeable Keyboard ($89.99CAD).
At first, I didn't want a 'fuller' keyboard, I wanted something portable. But then when you get to hold it, it's not so bad.
It's actually smaller than a 'regular' keyboard (mostly because it doesn't have the num pad), it's almost 'portable' where it can slip into a sleeve, except the 'ergonomic' bit of it gives it a bit of a 'hump' and the rest does make it longer. However, it still fits into my backpack along side the sleeve I put my Pixel Tablet in.
What I like is that first off, it's rechargeable. It uses a USB-C cable that plugs into the front.
I haven't had any indication of how long the battery lasts yet in my trials, and I've had it at my desk and taken with me to the clubhouse for work, and several hours and no indication of a low battery yet. I can't find on the site specifically how long the 500mAh battery will last, but other sites are saying between 2 and 3 months before you'd need to plug it in again.
Plus, it's not a big battery, so it will not take long to charge it up.
You can pair it up to your device via Bluetooth (it should connect up to 3 devices, and there's a button to 'swap' between the devices), but I like using the included little dongle. One less thing to play with or set up on a device. Just means that for my tablet I'll bring my little USB-A -> USB-C adapter (and I almost always have one on me for those folks that still use USB flash drives to try to send me files).
Aside from the 'ergonomic bend' it also has the keyboard 'feet' to prop it up, but to help be more ergonomic (i.e. less stressful on your wrists), the feet are by the 'palm end' of the keyboard. So the whole thing raises up a little bit more even.
I don't mind. It's comfortable for me and the several hours I've used it thus far
Now, the only thing I've noticed is that in the week or so I've been using it, there have been a couple keys that I find are slightly not in the right spot, so I'm learning. I'm also so used to a num-pad that I reach over there so often, but it's not there.
But I do love the space that it saves on my desk, it's 'deeper', but definitely not as wide.
Overall, I like it and I can see my son starting to eye it up (he's been talking how he's remapped a lot of his games from wasd to something else more central, but may have to revert). It's been a week and I'm still learning to retrain some of my fingers from reaching over for the INS/DEL/HOME... keys or the num pad, and I find the Enter key a little trickier to get my pinky finger on.
But it's a great addition so far for me.
One weird thing that I have noticed is that if I wake up my Chromebase with it, I notice that it immediately sets my volume to mute. Not sure where that setting might be, but it's only a minor headscratcher.
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