Belkin Wireless Keyboard - On the outside
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Looking at the device itself you can see that it breaks up into two parts. The first is a stand for the PDA. In addition to holding up the device, it also has the adjustable mirror for bending the light back towards your device. The stand can hold the PDA in either orientation, which is a good thing considering the variety of possible places for IR ports to reside. The mirror itself can be angled in any direction, it's on a pivot as well, so the whole assembly can be shifted over to line up with a port.
The other piece is the keyboard itself. After being folded out, you can see it looks very similar to a small laptop keyboard. There is no number pad, nor dedicated function keys. The keys themselves are fairly small, but not overly so.
The problem with the keyboard is how close the keys are to each other and how flat they are. Each key is hard to press individually, and there isn't much in the way of a positive feel to it to let you know that you have hit the correct one. You actually do have to pay some attention to what you are typing on the screen. After practicing a bit, it starts to feel a bit more natural, much the same as dealing with these 12" laptops after years of typing with a full size desktop keyboard.
Unfolded, you can also see the place for the battery, and the IR transmitter. Hiding a AAA battery isn't terribly difficult, but there is a cut-out on the other half of the board for where it rests when closed. Speaking of closing, a little latch is all that keeps it that way, with a sliding button on the outside to unlock it.
The two pieces snap together with ease for portability. In this state you can easily toss it into a backpack, or a jacket pocket if you trust things not to fall out of them. The aluminum construction isn't what I would term "heavy duty," but that's not something you really want in a light keyboard is it? The shell looks like it might eventually be susceptible to scratches and the like, but that's just superficial. It won't affect your ability to type. The stand doesn't look like much, but my Toshiba e830 is about as big of a PDA as you are going to find, and it held it up without complaint.
Next: The interface >>
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