Mini keyboards

Tuesday, May 11th, 2004

Some years ago me and some co-workers aquired a cheap mini keyboard through Benjamin. It’s a great keyboard and a whole lot smaller than normale keyboard since it doesn’t have that completely useless space inbetween the normal keys and the function keys and it’s missing the never-used numeric pad. Its dimensions are only 32x16cm and that saves a lot of desktop space.

Unfortunatelly we’ve never been able to find another place where we could buy them. Since the first one came from a computer fare and we didn’t know the name of the computer store that sold it to us we couldn’t buy it from the original source. The thing didn’t have a brandname on it, so it was also impossible to find another reseller.

But some googling brought up this:

Apparently it’s called an MTek K371L ErgoCompact Desktop. In the Netherlands you can buy one from Computer Home. There’s three different version:

• Mtek K371 MINI-KEYBOARD MET OFF KEY US ZILVER/ZWART : €22,61
• Mtek K371 MINI-KEYBOARD MET OFF KEY USB/PS/2 Combo: €17,85
• Mtek K371 ps/2 MINI-KEYBOARD MET OFF key: €16,66

The weird thing is, there’s another keyboard just like the MTek one. It’s called the ErgoStars Aquarius minikeyboard, and it’s priced at €55,-!! That’s more than three times as expensive! Perhaps it’s more ergonomical, but I doubt it’s any different from the one I’ve got.

Update: Also check out this post to find out how to use the office and power keys under linux.