I am not going to do software reviews here, and while this sort of will serve as one, it is in no way a trend.

About a year ago, perhaps a little more, I heard about this new keyboard that was being made, the Matias tactilepro keyboard. It is a pricey keyboard, but I was all over it. At least, once the backorder log was filled, I managed to get my hands on it, and so the saga began.

I am really picky about my interface with the computer. For something I spend fourteen or more hours a day on, I want my chair, mouse, display, and keyboard to be perfect. I will spare no cost to achieve this. To me, it is just insane to sit on a bar-stool, with a dodgy one button mouse, a 12″ CRT, and a mushy ass keyboard all day long. If I was a casual user, sure, but I am not, I do this for a living, and the three ways, four if you include the chair, need to be just right or I am constantly fighting my brain to give my work full attention.

Now, I did not jump right into a $100.00 keyboard without first doing some research. Very few people had got their hands on these at that point, however, the reviews were pretty stellar. Click click click and I was on my way to a tracking number.

The day it arrived, I plugged it in, ignored the install CD and went to work. I loved it. What you have to understand about this keyboard is that is uses a real mechanical switch on every key, sans the caps lock key. Once you get used to it, you begin to subconsciously rely on these audible clicks to let you know whether or not you have fully registered that letter. Off the cuff, I was typing about 10% faster than usual, and I am a pretty quick typist, despite the fact I never learned how and developed my own Kurt Style™.

Reviews started to come in a few weeks later, the general consensus being that if you can get over how loud it is, it is awesome. It is in fact loud, I am almost sure my neighbors can hear me banging this out right now, and by banging, thats literally.

The only competition out there is the Kensington StudioBoard, sadly, only resurrected from the cache. The reason I did not go with the Kensington, seeing as how it was out many months before, is it has a non standard keyboard layout, and I was just not into that.

Back to the Tactilepro. All was fun and games until the “9″ key started sticking. Not to bad, but getting “9999″ when you want “9″ is just not going to cut it. Luckily, Matias has a pretty generous lifetime warranty, so off it went to Canada. It came back a few weeks later, and I was in business. In the meantime, I ordered a second one as a spare, just in case some goofiness like this happened again.

Turns out that spare acted more like a cross ship savior than anything else. After a few weeks, the letters started to fully wear off the keyboard. Being one who relies on the letters, and the fact that one of the selling points of this keyboard is “Special characters and symbols at your fingertips”, I was in no mood to just live with it. Basically, they have printed out all the alternate symbols on the keyboard, stuff like accent characters, infinity symbols, the whole nine yards.

I packed up the worn out one and sent it back in, plugged in my spare, and I was back in business. Thank god for that spare. This time I called in and let them know I was getting a little bummed about this whole $30.00 shipping fee all the time for factory defects. Little they could do as I was told. However, I had a new one on the way, that they assured me would not wear out.

I will give them that they are pretty quick at turning these around, especially since they use regular USPS from Canada. In this case, a little too quick, as the clear spray paint they used as a make shift letter protector was still tacky to the touch. I was pissed, called in, and was told this is how they are addressing the problem for the time being. A plopped that one right back into a return box and went back to my spare. Worse still, upon looking closer at the spray paint job they did, you could see where there was over-spray on the outer plastic bezel of the keyboard. This was an unacceptable and shoddy workaround, especially for a $100.00 board.

It seems that Matias bitched and moaned to his supplier, and they managed to get screened letters that did in fact stick, and I was seemingly set. I had two working boards that were both holding up pretty well. Keep in mind, I never got more than three weeks or so of use out of any of these before I had to send one back in, so the verdict was still out.

I jumped into a pretty large web development job. If you are not privy to how this works, it goes like this:

Open your favorite text editor
Write some code
Save that code
Command-Tab to Safari
Command-R to refresh Safari and see your new code work, hopefully…
Command-Tab back to your text editor
Rinse and repeat

On a large job, you may end up doing this thousands of times a day. All of a sudden, my thumb was killing me. I don’t know about you, but my thumb is what I use to hit the Command key. Add in a series of Command-A, Command-C, Command-T, Command-P routines, and you beat the hell out of the command key.

And here we have a major problem. My command key is worn out. Not worn out in that it does not work, but work out mechanically. It works fine if you put 100% vertical pressure on it, but if you apply any angular pressure to the key, it rubs wrong on the inner plastics and gives back significant resistance.

I went as far as to test it, where every key takes about 15 pennies (apx.) of weight to press, the command key, with just a slight angular press to it, takes three times the pennies. And yes, I am barely pressing sideways on that key. None of the other keys have this problem, so I know it is an issue with wear. Just to be sure, I plugged in my spare, and all was well, for about 1 week of heavy use. Now I have two keyboards that literally kill my thumb to the point where I try to use my pinky instead. It is, to say the least, maddening.

Time to put on my research hat. I called in to Matias, and was pretty much told to buy the Kensington. This was pretty unacceptable, but I guess they were waring thin with me on this lifetime warranty fiasco they got themselves into. At this point, I pretty much left it at that, and I struggle. But I pressed on with the research.

Here is the deal. Matias and Kensington both use the same facility to make the boards. Matias uses an Alps Switch, while the Kensington uses a Cherry Switch. You be the guess as to which one is cheaper. I talked to some engineers who do nothing but live and breathe keyboards all day long, and the solution is the Cherry Switch, it just costs more, double in fact. So know I know why, but how to fix it?

I don’t really know, you can find the Kensington ones at various places still, but they have this confounded “\” key on the wrong damn spot. Of course, there are the old IBM M-Style boards, but those take some fancy trickery to get the PS2 to make its way over to the Mac, and even then, reports are, it is not 100%.

I do have to say, all in all, for the most part, Matias has been pretty supportive to me. There is certainly some noise on the interweb where Matias, the owner, was involved in some form of lawsuit, which right now, I can not remember, but there was talk, and it was not favorable in the Mac community.

I am half tempted to try out the Das Keyboard, however, there are no printed letters at all, and that is a barrier to me. Granted, they have custom weighted keys so your less strong fingers do not need to work so hard.

This is one of those cases were the nature of web posts in regards to this keyboard are going to give you no warning of it’s shortcomings. If you search the forums, you find people who by and large, in the 90% range, love the thing. I assume they posted within a few weeks of owning one. Rarely does one come back to follow up the review and amend it, though I certainly have found some posts where people are in the very same boat as me.

About the best review in a positive way you can find is by Michael Tsai, and even he leans on the Kensington as being somewhat better, but is also stymied by the strange layout. I also have a feeling he has not used the Matias for a month at at time and then taken the time to update his comments.

So now, I sit, with two boards, both with command keys that will probably cause my thumb to shit out on my at an early age, and no where to really go. Perhaps back to the mushy sound of Macally, despite that damn rounded spacebar they insist on using.