FrogPad Ion

Rating:
Summary: Very well thought out, not yet perfect.
Review: I'm actually typing this on a frogpad while I eat my lunch with the other hand( an unexpected ....bonus?). I bought the Frogpad to help fend off wrist trouble brought on by typing on laptops held stable with wrist strength. The Frogpad is very easy to travel with and allows me to have my shoulders much more open and my typing hand at any angle to the screen. The keys themselves have excellent travel and click.

I've only been using the Frog for a week or so, so I can't answer the all important questions of speed and learning time. I'm about 13wpm right now, down from 78ish on a qwerty. Learning is MUCH faster than the handykey twiddler (I gave up after a month without breaking 10wpm.) The strength of the Frogpad's frequency based chords really shines through. I'll be fumbling for the "z" one second, then I'll rip out an optimised word like "neither" at qwerty speed. The Frog is different enough that my hand gets tired, but some of that is probably me tensing up when I don't need to.

There are some bugs and gotchas: the first Frogpad I bought didn't work on OS X (It was fine on xp and linux). A new model has that fixed.
Most Unix commands are set up for qwerty and require more effort. "#!/bin/sh" or regex is possible on the Frog, but not as free as English. And the Frog is right hand only. I would love to flip a switch and mirror the keys for left hand use.

Rating:
Summary: Causes frequent data loss.
Review: If you frequently enter information into web forms--on message boards, in chat rooms, on intranet sites at work, or elsewhere for other reasons--avoid this product. I'll briefly explain the problem.

There are fifteen letter keys that type fifteen letters when pressed alone. By pressing another key, the Green key, in combination with the letter keys, one types the other eleven letters and some other characters. The letter keys double as number keys and arithmetic symbols, and twelve of them triple as function keys. To type numbers, one activates the Orange key. To press function keys, one uses the Green key while the Orange key is activated--but recall that one types eleven of the letters using the Green key, without the Orange key activated.

The user accidentally activates the Orange key very frequently (most often when he's using the Orange key to press Backspace or Delete, but also in many other situations). Since the user won't know Orange is activated right away, he'll continue typing. If he types 'L', his browser will refresh, because 'L' is typed by Green + H, and with Orange activated, that's F5.

For about two months, I exclusively used a left-handed FrogPad. I was extremely excited about being able to point with a pen tablet with my right hand while typing with my left, so that I wouldn't have to keep picking up and putting down the stylus. I was losing information multiple times per day from hitting F5, however, so I packed it up and moved back to QWERTY.

Of course, the same design flaw causes one to press the other function keys. When one accidentally presses F1, for instance, the Help window pops up.

I've spent hours in FrogPad's Technical Support forum urging them to address this problem (and explaining the simple solution), but I think they fear that if they admit there's a problem, it will hurt their sales. I hope they plan to fix the problem in the next product revision because a safe FrogPad would finally deliver all that I hoped to receive when I spent $179.88 and tens of hours of practice, but I think they want to sell as many of the flawed FrogPads as possible first, despite the potential harm to users (and harm to their brand).

I would only recommend this product, in its current flawed, dangerous, and expensive state, to people with one functional hand. Some people tout its portability and small footprint, but if one's using a laptop, he has a portable QWERTY keyboard included and exposed. One might be tempted to use a FrogPad with a tablet PC, but I'd recommend a folding QWERTY instead. They are just as portable as FrogPads, and they won't cause data loss.