I own two of these keyboards -- one for home and one for the office, both with the VIP3 attachment (highly recommended). I've been through several ergonomic designs, and for me, this is the best on the market, by far. The low-pressure, rubber-dome keys are pleasant to type on, and the 20" separation means that i can position the sections in such a way that i can keep my arms by my side and my shoulders relaxed. I have zero complaints about build quality, and i feel that my money was well spent.

At this point, i should be clear: I do recommend this keyboard (see above). Despite its shortcomings, i bought a second, and i would buy a third if i had a third location of on-site programming work. But for the remainder of this review, i will be lambasting the designers for some unfortunate decisions that cause me daily grief. Given the attention that Kinesis gave to most areas of this keyboard, i find it perplexing that they included some truly brain-dead "features" for a modern piece of equipment.

Firstly, the placements of several keys are questionable. The escape key may as well be in the upper atmosphere -- it's large, but i have to completely remove my hand from the keyboard and issue a shoulder movement to be able to reach it. As a programmer and a vim user, i press the escape key a lot. This keyboard has forced me to remap it to another key. The 'home', 'end', 'page up', 'page down', and 'delete' keys are nearly impossible to navigate efficiently without looking down at the keyboard. Somehow, 'insert' wound up as a function key (that is, you have to use the Fn-modifier to access it), along with 'scroll lock' and 'num lock', whereas 'pause/break' and 'printscreen' get center stage. Was this keyboard designed in the late '80s?

Speaking of the Fn-modifier, the Fn key is a locking modifier. You can't hold it and press the key you want (e.g. 'insert') -- when you press Fn, the keyboard locks in Fn mode, and you have to press Fn again afterwards to revert. I get that they're trying to make life easier for people who use number pads a lot (which, um, you need Fn mode to access, even with 'num lock' on), but i can't imagine that it would have taken more than ten seconds' thought to realize that this would be a bad idea.

The "convenience keys" (web keys, copy/cut/paste keys, etc.) are also poorly placed. I'm constantly accidentally hitting them, either at random or when i mean to press, say, the 'grave' key for a backtick or tilde (as a programmer, i use these a lot as well). This is frustrating, yes, but i could have easily disabled them or remapped them to something more benign, were it not for my next, and perhaps biggest, complaint.

The "convenience keys" are not actually media keys. They cannot be remapped, because Kinesis made assumptions about your running operating system and hard-coded them as key combinations. I practically excreted a brick upon discovering this.

A little background (skip this paragraph if you know how key events are handled by the OS):
On a typical keyboard, if you press 'a', the operating system receives an event with a certain keycode. Your operating system knows that, since you told it you have a US keyboard, this keycode is associated with the letter 'a', per the US qwerty keyboard map. Typical US keyboard maps have keycodes for media keys, as well, which are interpreted as special key symbols. When you press a "web forward" key, the OS would look at the keymap and see that it lines up with the WebForward event. If a web browser then sees that you pressed WebForward, it knows how to handle it. Similarly, there's a WebHomePage event, a VolumeUp event, MediaPause, etc.. I use Linux/X, so my events are called things like 'XF86Forward', 'XF86HomePage', 'XF86AudioRaiseVolume', and others, respectively, but it's the same idea. Even if you buy a special keyboard with some newfangled media key that has no entry in your operating system's keyboard map, you can still map the key to do whatever you want, because a unique keycode is issued when you press it.

That is, except on this keyboard. Here, the 'web forward' key does not issue its own (standard!) keycode, but instead issues an "alt+right arrow" key combination. 'Web backward', similarly, issues "alt+left arrow". "Web home" issues "alt+home". "Copy" issues "control+c" and "paste" issues "control+v". Actually, since it issues them by keycode, and i switched the 'control' and 'caps lock' keys in my keymap, for me, these latter events issue "capslock-c" and "capslock-v", instead.

In what seems to have been an effort to combat what they knew was horrible placement for these failures of convenience keys, they put raised ridges on them (and on the home/end/pgup/pgdn keys) , so you can tell what key you're on. You know, like the raised ridges on the 'f' and 'j' keys. However, they put these ridges on _all_ of the right-edge keys, so they don't help you know which key you're fingering _at all_. The ridges are thus completely useless, since you already know that your fingers are at the rightmost edge of a column of keys with a gap beside it due to, well, the gap that's beside it. This last point feels like a nitpick in comparison to my previous complaint, but since it's also related, i'm including it as well.

In summary:
The day that someone comes along with something comparable, without the stupidity listed above, i will buy it. The day that Kinesis releases a Freestyle3 that's identical to this one, but fixes all of the above, i'll buy two. But until that day, this is, begrudgingly, my keyboard of choice.

This is a simple yet elegant idea for an ergonomic keyboard. So far it seems to have helped the problems I was having especially with my left wrist while typing. Having used it for about two weeks now I can tell the difference. I am glad I went for the 20" extended separation since I needed the extra distance. I am typing in an upright position with my elbows on the armrests of my office chair and my arms parallel to each other which also helps my back. I have tried many variations and settled on to use it in this way together with the VIP3 kit at a 15 degree slope. The only issue I had was with the "Y" key that I apparently used to hit with my left hand before as some others have also pointed out, but I re-adapted in over a week for the most part. I am a relatively fast typist and the keys have the right degree of softness for me so that I can maintain a good speed while typing.

Ok, so I bought this keyboard for one reason - play games. I play on very low sensitivity and my other compact 84 key keyboard sometimes gets in the way when i play, it gets very annoying. I have a 24x24 mouse pad that I use that is not sufficient, so I decided there has to be a "half keyboard" available that has the same key spacing as a regular keyboard. This one was the only one on the market that I can find. It works great...if you press 3-4 or less buttons at a time, otherwise anything over that the keys just stop registering(AKA keyboard ghosting) and that is WAY more annoying than my 84 keys compact keyboard. The fact of the matter is for $100+ dollars the old school hardware that can't compete with today's comparable priced keyboards just isn't worth it for gaming. 1/5 stars

Now for regular use - posture and wrist alignment, this works great for that. The only issue I have with it is the same as above - sometimes I type WAY too fast and it does the keyboard ghosting. I use linux and putty a lot and this does get in the way when you're trying to write scripts. Imagine you're typing away and you see a missing character, you know how annoying it is when you have to use the arrow key to highlight where the missing character is and input the value(For those who don't know, you can't use your mouse to highlight the space of where you want to input your character - got to use the keyboard). Anyway, if they fixed the keyboard ghosting issue, this keyboard would be the best keyboard on the market for me, hands down. I would pay DOUBLE the price if they got this fixed+mechanical keys, that's just how much potential this keyboard is worth. But for $100+ dollar that works like a $10 dollar keyboard? Don't waste your time or effort, at most I would spend is $20 dollars for this keyboard. For regular use 2/5 stars

Sorry for any grammar/punctuation/misspelling errors, typed from my phone.

This product has a steep learning curve if you've spent years using a typical keyboard. I went with the 20" separation since I was not sure about 9" and I could always re-position the cable, but I can't add anything to it. Now that I have had it for a few months and have found the right positions, I mostly like it. I deducted a star because the keyboard is not programmable, and there is some strange placement of some keys that I frequently hit by accident. I would love to be able to change a few keys because there are a few that I use a lot and can't quite get it 100% without looking. I don't use the accessory kit, but just 2 gel wrist pads. I used a few notebooks for each side to simulate an angle, but I have both flat and am very satisfied with it this way.