Over the last few years there have been several products (usually made by joystick companies) claiming to be such a fantastic controller for first person shooters that you will forever shun your trusty keyboard and mouse. Most of these products ended their short lifespan in failure. Why? The mouse and keyboard don’t need replacing. They have long since proven to be the best format for playing a first person shooter. Rather than trying to make some worthless keyboard\joystick hybrid monstrosity, a company from Japan called Scythe has decided to redo the traditional keyboard layout a bit to make it better suited for first person shooters and MMORPGS (the popular catch phrase this minute). So, does it deliver?
The “Ergo” from this board’s name obviously means ergonomic, a.k.a. split keyboard. Normally, your arms and hands have to be angled inwards to use a keyboard. You can reduce the risk of hand damage by splitting the keys of the main QWERTY area in two, and angling the two halves to match the angle of the hands. So the theory says anyway. The scientific jury is still out on that one.
The Ergo Diver is split in the same place as other such keyboards; T, G and B are on one side of the split and Y, H and M are on the other. Whether or not this will bother you really depends on your typing style. ASDF, JKL: people shouldn’t have too much of a problem. If you’re a keyboard rebel though, getting used to a split might take you a long time.
As far as connection to the PC, the Ergo Diver is a perfectly ordinary keyboard. It's a dual-mode USB-and-PS/2 device; its cable ends in a USB plug, and there's a PS/2 plug adapter. In USB mode, it uses the standard Human Interface Device drivers which every modern USB-capable operating system should be able to use without a problem. If you’re still using Windows 95 OSR2, you need to be put on a list and dealt with accordingly.
If it were just a regular split board, like Microsoft’s Natural Keyboard Pro, for instance, there really wouldn’t be much to talk about. What makes this keyboard interesting, (as you have probably noticed by now) is there are a lot of keys in a lot of weird places. This was done on purpose, to make it a better keyboard for FPS gaming. Some of it actually makes sense. Some of it.
