I mentioned in my last post that the Ergomotion keyboard was a bit too wide for my liking making the classic mistake of hogging up deskspace without leaving room for other necessary input devices. This extra distance your arm has to travel to reach your mouse can make all the difference to your RSI.  I usually complain about this issue with reference to the extra space that the numeric keypad takes up – but more precisely the problem is that there’s usually one section for navigation keys (home, up, down etc) and then another section for the numeric keypad. Which together can be quite a hog on your desk space.

But it turns out that the promotional video shows the original keyboard design, but they pulled back the release date to make a more compact design. If you look at the images of the Ergomotion keyboard on the Smartfish site, or above, you’ll notice that these two sections have been neatly merged now and are nice and tight to the regular key, making it quite compact overall.

So there goes any reservations I had about it. It looks like a really well designed ergonomic keyboard in the truest sense, in that it takes every keyboard issue into consideration. Good job!

Smartfish technologies have announced a new product range, ErgoMotion. It’s an interesting concept and mostly well executed.

An ergonomic setup with all devices set in the same position everyday is not a good ergonomic setup. Change is good. They have taken this idea, and come up with an interesting idea, products that slowly change position/angles automatically. See the video below. Or on their own site.

They say they collaborated with top professionals in the field but they seem to have made the classic keyboard mistake of including a numberpad, which for people with RSI is much more of a disadvantage. See first section in my keyboards post. It’s a wee bit worrying that the quotes in the video are from the engineer and the designer. How about use case comments from rsi sufferers? Great that it looks nice but that’s the last of my worries. Not sure I’m the target market.

Seems like a really good effort at doing something new for ergonomics but I’d like to see a compact, version without the keypad.

Update: Turns out they had already resolved this issue. See update post.

Their mouse is interesting too, and I might check it out at some stage, but again they seem to have approached it from a classic mouse perspective, and added motion. But the base position presents the same problems as a classic mouse, that requires you to twist your wrist slightly, rather than the more natural handshake position of a vertical mouse. So I might hold off and see do they do a version where the base position is more vertical. But because it is so flexible, it might just make up for it. Flexibility is RSI’s worst enemy, so I’ll be keeping an eye on Ergomotion.