After the Arc mouse, Microsoft Hardware continues its Arc design scheme and has come out with their latest, the Arc Keyboard. The design of the keyboard is very ergonomic, reminiscence of the older Microsoft ergonomics keyboards – with one small exception. They keyboard itself is half the size of any standard keyboard in the market.
From first glance, you can see that the keyboard has …well, an arc shape to it. Because of the curvature, your hands (even big ones!) can comfortably type on it without feeling any discomfort for long periods of time.
Microsoft is also ingenious in designing the keyboard itself – from a glance, you would expect that it has only the keys you have on a standard keyboard on a laptop; but amazingly, it is fully featured, complete with page up/down and the home/end keys! They managed to do this by only using function keys 1 through 6, but with the Fn key in use, F7 till F12 is double duty with the F1 till F6. You even have basic multimedia controls with the volume and mute buttons. The travel for each key is very reasonable – every key stroke is satisfyingly deep and tactile without feeling too plasticky or unnatural.
The Arc Keyboard is connected to the PC via a tiny dongle which attaches magnetically to the back of the keyboard when not in use.
There are some concessions to the design however. Because of the small size, the traditional arrow keys cannot be fitted to the Arc Keyboard. Instead, we have sort of like a d-pad that you often see in video game controllers.
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