Reviewed by: Davis Chastain

The Palm Portable Keyboard is a marvel of compact, portable design and function. This full-size keyboard folds in quarters and snaps closed, resulting in a package that is only a little larger than my IIIc. It comes with a zippered pouch for storage. To open the keyboard, you simply press a latch that unlocks the unit, unfold it, and slide the keys together. An easel-like affair folds back, with a connector at the base. The Palm device slides onto this connector and then leans back against the easel device. The whole process takes maybe three seconds.

The keys have a very nice positive feedback with a subtle click. I can type up to around 50 words per minute and the cursor kept up fine. All the standard keys are there, plus additional keys for datebook, phonebook, ToDo, and Memo. You can assign specific apps to nine locations (i.e. "cmd" + "1"). There is a very extensive shortcut list of key combinations for navigation and to enter special characters. In fact, this is one of the only drawbacks, for there are well over 60 specific key commands! I'm not sure how anyone could remember them all.

Another small drawback is the resident program seems to slow graffiti down. Deselecting "Enable Keyboard" inside the program puts graffiti back to normal, just remember to re-enable before attaching the keyboard or else the Palm thinks you're trying to hotsync!

All in all, this is an excellent piece of engineering. It's a little delicate (obviously to save weight and space) so treat it like a watch, or say, a Palm device and you should get a lot of use out of it. This piece of hardware will be most useful to those who email or who enter large blocks of data at a time (like product reviews). I typed this review on my IIIc with the keyboard and I found it to be as easy as using the PC and keyboard at my desk. I give this a five needle rating!

Rating: 5 needles (out of five).

Additional Comments by: Greg Gaub

I have to agree with pretty much everything Davis wrote. It's quick and easy to setup, and virtually hassle free when being put to use. I knew that the latest driver was the best choice in this case, so I forewent the keyboard program that was on the accompanying CD-ROM and downloaded the latest driver application from the Palm Support pages. With this driver, I did not notice any slowdown at all with Graffiti input. As a result, there's no reason for me to disable the keyboard driver. I disabled it just to test, and the Palm still thinks it's going to HotSync when you put the it on the Keyboard with the driver disabled. With the latest driver, this shouldn't be a problem, though, since you're not likely to disable the driver at all.

I did have some weird resetting problems when I first installed the keyboard application, though. After some fiddling, I attribute these problems to an installed Hackmaster hack I had running. It was a hack that modified the on-screen keyboard. It's possible that the hack and the PPK driver didn't like each other. With the PPK, though, there's almost no need for the on-screen keyboard, and certainly none for the hack, so I deleted that hack.

Another cool thing to note is that the keyboard has buttons that function as all the hardware buttons on the palm, as well as quick and easy ways to activate on-screen buttons from the keyboard. Using the tab key in many applications will move the cursor to the next field, which is nice. There's also a backlight button mapping on the PPK. With the 60+ key combination functions built in to the PPK, there's very little need for the stylus, but if there is, you can keep your stylus at the ready by propping it in one of the holes in the top left or right-hand corner of the keyboard casing. If that's not good enough for you, the keyboard application on the palm has a complete listing of all the shortcut key combinations, and how to use them, should you forget some of them, or want to try to learn the most useful ones.

I will admit, though, that I probably would not have purchased this keyboard at all, had the Office Depot in my area decided not to honor a misprint in their sale flyer, allowing me to buy the PPK at a mere $20! I can FIND ways to make use of it at that price... and I did! I used it to let people type their name and e-mail into an electronic guestbook on my PalmV at the October SeaPUG meeting!