Kinesis Freestyle For Mac and VIP Accessory

Adam Berenstain — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:31:00 -0600

What it lacks in style, the Freestyle makes up for in function.

Don’t get us wrong. We love Apple’s industrial designs as much as the next guy, but sometimes form must take a backseat to function. The ergonomic design and optional accessories of the Kinesis Freestyle for Mac can help you type more comfortably while keeping repetitive stress injuries at bay.

The Freestyle’s two modules can be set at the natural angle of your hands at rest, no matter how you type; a chunky cable connects the modules and lets you position them up to eight inches apart. A nearly six-foot USB cord connects the keyboard to your Mac, but unfortunately the Freestyle lacks any USB ports of its own. The VIP Accessory (available separately or included in a bundle) adds two wrist rests with cushioned pads and risers to elevate the middle of both keyboard modules 10 or 15 degrees. The Freestyle and VIP feel pleasingly sturdy together, but they come apart easily if you want to experiment with your setup. However, the VIP’s price tag—almost half the cost of the keyboard itself—feels a bit high.

The Freestyle sports the dedicated OS X-specific keys from Apple’s keyboard you’ve come to rely on and adds two more that show and hide the Dock and reveal your desktop in Exposé. There are even keys for frequently used commands like Copy and Paste, Undo, Select All, and more. Blue lights set in the keyboard’s frame let you know when the Caps Lock and Function keys are engaged. The Function key locks, so there’s no need to hold it down while straining your hand to reach another key with a different finger.

Typing on the Freestyle with the VIP attached certainly feels comfortable during long work sessions; we could relax our wrists and forearms and let our fingers do the work. Our eyes, however, did a little too much work; descriptive text on the Freehand’s keys is unnecessarily tiny and difficult to read at a glance. But those keys are responsive and quiet, and their old-school size makes them easier targets than the chiclet-style keys of Apple’s newest keyboards.

The Freestyle doesn’t require driver software, so setting it up is only a matter of tapping a few keys when prompted by OS X’s Keyboard Setup Assistant—although Freestyle’s Dashboard key didn’t work reliably on our test Mac. Kinesis tech support was responsive but couldn’t help isolate the problem. Happily, a brand-new user account on the same computer had no issues with the keyboard.

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Kinesis Freestyle For Mac and VIP Accessory