PLUM Happy... sorta

At the beginning of December, I got myself a PLUM keyboard. I had read about them in PC magazine back when they were around 100 bucks each. Since then they've apparently outsourced the production and the price has been cut to a quarter. I decided to write a bit about what I think about it when I was good enough at typing on it, and here I am.

For starters, it's tiny. The keys are full sized, but there's no extra space and no numpad. There's also no distinguishing labels anywhere on the front of the keyboard, which I actually like. The layout is the trademark so to speak. The keyboard itself is 6 keys high and 16 keys wide. All the keys are the same size, with the exception of Enter and Space, which are three keys wide each. For the most part, it's wonderful, except for backspace. I always hated QWERTY keyboards with only a single wide backspace, and I still make mistakes hitting this one occasionally.

The learning itself was quite easy, and it took me less than a week to memorize the letter locations. The other characters took a little bit longer, and I still have to glance down to hit the brackets/braces. The first day of learning, I realized how well the layout was designed by how many words I could type without moving any of my fingers off the 8 home keys. The use of both thumbs individually (Enter on the left, Space on the right) is wonderful, as the spacebar typically takes up far too much space.

The keyboard, however, is not perfect. The top row of function keys goes from F1 to F15. A standard Windows keyboard only goes to F12. F13 is also Print Screen, and F14 and F15 are unlabeled. They are actually Scroll Lock and Pause/Break respectively, but have been neglected in their labeling. There is no Num Lock, of course, and no Scroll Lock light, as it's pretty much obsolete anyway, yet the F14 key is assigned to it. My only guess is that it had to be that KeyCode to match up to Macintosh compatibility.

The last thing, which annoys me to no end, are the six blank keys, which reside around the arrows. They do absolutely nothing whatsoever. They send no value to the computer, and they aren't programmable. They are an entire waste. These keys either need to send proprietary values which can be programmed or otherwise used as actual keys, or they need to be removed and replaced with casing. To make them pressable buttons is pointless. I don't understand it at all.

As a side note, and totally unrelated to usefulness or quality, I wish it came in more colors than "90's Beige." I'm tired of computer parts in that stupid off-white color. Personally, I'd like a blue or black one.