| This thing is really great! I got my Visor Prism a good while ago, and since I'm finally back in school I started looking at keyboards. Of course you all know that the choices for a full size keyboard are the Gotype! and the stowaway. In almost any case I'm willing to sacrafice compactness for functionality. Which perfectly matches the scenario of the Gotype! vs. Stowaway. All my friends that have Visors(3) thought that the stowaway was the best by far just because it folds down to pocket size. But I was wishing on the Gotype! to be the best. It has shortcut keys programmable for up to 18 different functions. The keys aren't that small, they are actually better than keys on a full size keyboard. Although, I must admit, after using the Gotype! for a while, when I went back to a full size keyboard it seemed huge. The typing is so great I even typed up a whole paper on the palm os. With the portability compared to a normal keyboard, as I was typing my paper, I was able to take the keyboard all over the house with me. The absolute ONLY problem I had was when the keyboard wouldn't respond I had to do a soft reset, and this only happened twice. The first day I brought it to school my friends were amazed. All day they were begging me to try it. I even used it for an interview for our school paper. This makes any typing application perform ten times better. And this also works with AOL Mail for IMing and checking mail. My friends are insane for this keyboard, I will be using this for as long as I have my Visor Prism. |
| I recently purchased the GoType keyboard for the Handspring Visor directly from the Landware website, and unfortunately have found it to be, for me, an almost completely unusable product. This isn't to say that it's a BAD product, however. For a lot of people, it's no doubt extremely useful. The keyboard itself is very well uilt and fully functional, with nicely laid out keys. Though a bit bigger than the Stowaway when not in use, it's still pretty compact, and can easily fit inside a bookbag. And while the outer casing can get a bit scratched and dinged, it does a good job of keeping the keyboard itself safe from damage. But now the bad part. If you have large hands, and especially if you hunt and peck, this keyboard is very difficult to use. The keys are just too close together, and have a very low profile, requiring you to press them down firmly right in the middle of the key to register the keystroke. Using the GoType, while still faster than graffiti, has cut my typing speed down to less than half of normal (and I'm not that quick to begin with), and long term typing leaves my wrists sore. In a lot of cases I'm actualy faster using the stylus and the onscreen keyboard on my Visor, and can actually type faster using a thumbboard. To make matters worse, the keyboard did not come with the promised bundled software (TakeNote and WordSleuth). The Landware website I bought it from was advertising a free bundle with Blue Nomad's excellent Wordsmith program, but even that was a bit misleading: I had to email their support department to discover that the software is not "bundled" with the keyboard, you have to download it, then email them for the serial number, then email Blue Nomad for the registration key (none of this is ever explained in the documentation or their website; I only discovered any of this after emailing technical support; to their credit, they did respond very promptly to the email, though I still don't have TakeNote or WordSleuth as promised). All in all, the GoType hasn't been a good experience for me. If you have smaller hands it might very well be a great buy, but for my money it just doesn't cut it. |
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