Taking a look at the Microsoft Wireless Comfort Keyboard, the first thing that you notice is that there is a curve to the keys. This is what Microsoft calls their Comfort Curve Keyboard design. This is meant to simulate an ergonomic design without going to the “split keyboard” design. I have typed on many different keyboards, and I actually prefer the split design of the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (again with the long names…), but the curve of the Comfort 6000 Keyboard is a natural progression from a standard straight keyboard.

Typing was a bit odd at first, but after a couple of seconds, you just adjust your wrists to the proper angles, and everything is like normal. There is some awkwardness for those of us that never took Keyboarding 101 in school. When not using the proper “finger to key” strokes, you will probably hit the wrong key. This could be considered a good thing to force better typing. This review was completely typed using the Wireless Comfort Keyboard. There were no big surprises, except for that the Enter and right side Shift keys seemed, to me, a bit high. I also found that the Caps Lock key is placed right where my left pinky finger wants to be. I do, however, have bigger hands and those with medium to small sized hands may find this to be a comfortable placement.

Along the bottom of the keyboard, is a slightly cushioned palm rest. This feels like a fake leather substitute and is very comfortable. One thing to consider is that on hot days, if your palm sweat, this becomes very irritating as your hands feel like they are sticking to the keyboard.

On the bottom of the keyboard you can see that there is a slightly sunken in area. This hides the two folding keyboard feet and the warning and instruction labels. The folding keyboard feet provide about a 17mm height boost for those of you that like the inclined keyboard surface. Below the palm rest you can see that there is a covered battery compartment. This houses two of the four provided Energizer AA batteries. To the right of the battery compartment, you can see that there is a small plastic button. This is for synchronization between the RF receiver and the wireless keyboard.

On the left of the keyboard is a handful of shortcut keys and a “Zoom Slider” lever. The buttons are, from left to right, Web/Home (opens your default web browser), Calendar (opens the Windows clock/calendar), Mail (opens Hotmail in Internet Explorer, not your default browser), Messenger (opens Window’s Messenger) and finally My Documents (opens the My Documents folder). The Zoom Slider is a magnification adjustment for applications. For example, in Microsoft Word, the Zoom Slider will zoom in or zoom out on the document. In your web browser, it will increase or decrease the text on the page.

At the top left of the keyboard you find a Mute, Volume Down and a Volume Up buttons. These buttons worked according to their labels. There was a slight delay when the system was under load, but the buttons did respond. Note, the volume buttons control the system’s master volume and not the application volume. To the right of the Volume buttons, there are five “My Favorites” buttons along with a Star button. The Star button brings up the configuration menu for the five Favorites buttons. The Favorites buttons can be configured to open any program, web address etc.

To the right of the Favorites buttons are the media keys. They consist of a Play/Pause button, Stop, Back and Forward buttons. These default to control Windows Media Player. If WMP is not open, then the play button will open the media player. On the far right, above the numeric keypad, there are three buttons. The first button is labeled, and opens, Calculator. The center button is labeled Log Off. This brings up the Windows Log Off screen to which you can choose to switch users or log off the current user. The last button is labeled Sleep and will place the system in Sleep Mode. All of these buttons work flawlessly with Windows XP. One thing to note is that the Sleep button will put the system into Sleep mode, but you can’t resume from the sleep state without pressing the main power button on your computer enclosure, or configuring the system through the control panel.

The “F” keys (ie: F4 or F12) are grouped in clusters of three keys and serve a dual purpose. At the far right of the top row of keys, there is a Function key that gives the keys on the keyboard the same affect as a laptop’s functionality. For example, if you engage the Function key, the F1 key becomes a Help key, F2 is an Undo key and F3 is a Redo key. This goes through out the keyboard.

Between the character pad and the numeric pad is the four arrow keys and the page keys. The arrow keys are arranged in the mostly preferred format of Up centered and above the Left, Down and Right keys. The page buttons located directly above the arrow keys are placed, in my opinion, in an awkward arrangement. The delete key is a “double tall” key, and the End key is at the top right of the cluster. This makes it difficult to not lift up your hands when typing a document, and needing to quickly move to the end of the line.