Yesterday, I purchased the Gyration Cordless Compact Keyboard and Mouse and have been using it for a little under a day now. I puchased it because I have a laptop with no standard PS/2 keyboard connection, so I needed USB keyboard anyway. The cordless optical mouse was a nice plus.

Keyboard: The keyboard is small (and not curved, as the picture seems to imply), lacking the typical numeric keypad to the right of the standard main set of keys. This reminds me of the Happy Hacking Keyboard, which I've always wanted, and is a major plus in my book: The missing keys reduce distance to the mouse, which is better for your hands, and I never end up using the numeric keypad anyway (typing class taught me to use those numbers up thar).

Wireless keyboards have to transmit keypresses somehow: This one uses four AAA batteries which hide in the ridge on the back of bottom. Unhelpfully, the company included a set of cheap Chinese-made ones. I say unhelpfully because when I first put them in the keyboard and stated playing with it, I thought the keyboard was broken or that I was operating it wrong. Eventually, it occurred to me that the batteries might be dead: In fact, they were. Perhaps they were carried from China by canoe. I hate Chinese products. Note to Gyration: Cheap batteries are not better than none at all. They raise your price, they cost me money, and they can cause stupid consumers to consider returning products which actually work otherwise.

Mouse: The mouse is your standard optical mouse, though arched slightly. Underneath the arch is a mysterious button which enables the mouse's gyroscopic movement mode. When not in use, the mouse rests on a stand which recharges the mouse's NiCd battery pack. The instructions tell me there's an optional replacement pack which allows you to use 3 AAA batteries. (My old logitech wireless used two. I've had it for years and never changed the batteries.)

Base: There's also a "base" which plugs into your USB port. When you first use the thing, you have to press the "Learn" button on the base and "Teach" buttons on the keyboard and mouse to let the base know who it's working with. The base is powered by the USB connection, so the only thing that will occupy a plug on your powerbar is the mouse recharger. It's also nice to have a USB mouse and keyboard that take only one USB slot (my laptop has two), which prevent me from needing an additional USB hub.

Usage experience: I've been alternating between a standard keyboard and my slightly-condensed laptop keyboard for a while now. The keyboard size, although standard, in theory, strikes my fingers as slighty off, so they're still trying to figure out where everything is. Also, it seems to require a bit of pressure to strike a key, so sometimes the apostrophe and minus keys seem not to fire sometimes when I hit them with my pinky. Also, like a lot of recent keyboards, the "Backspace" key is tiny and far away. I've reverted to using ctrl-H under UNIX. They certainly could have made it bigger -- who cares if the keyboard is a tiny bit wider? This is a keyboard, not a laptop computer.

I think these things will sort themselves out over time, so it's not a serious minus. There's also 11 little programmable buttons above the usual suspects. As usual, I can't think of anything I really want to do with them.

Of course, a major plus is the wirelessness. I've tried moving the monitor near the couch and typing from there. No problem at all, rather nice, actually. Putting the keyboard in the lap seems ergonomically decent.

The mouse is decent: It's, you know, a mouse. I find the middle button, the scroll wheel itself, a tad difficult to click without turning, but that's common in my experience with this configuration.

The gyro ability is kind of nice, but it takes a bit of getting used to. It reminds me of the Twiddler, which I attempted in vain to master a number of years ago. I found that turning down the mouse acceleration and movement settings helps a bit. It's fine for most infrequent mousing tasks, but I wouldn't want to use it for Photoshop. :-) As I mentioned, you have to click a button on the bottom of the mouse to enable gyroscopic motion: tilting front/back is down/up, and side to side is as expected. The main difficult, though, comes from trying to figure where to put your fingers: since the two buttons cover the majority of the top of the mouse body, it's hard to get a grip on any spot that doesn't end up clicking. It's doable, but the design could have been improved. Also, the mouse wheel, for my hand, is far enough away that it's difficult for my thumb to reach while depressing the gyro button. None of these are killers, but I think a bit of usability testing might have revealed these problems.

Speaking of usability testing: There's one aspect of this system which is both insanely stupid, and would have been easily fixable. The base contains the key/scroll/num lock LEDs, which can be useful. Unfortunately, it also contains a brilliant LED which flashes spastically, many times, as long as you are hitting keys. It's highly annoying, and makes me want to hide the base somewhere far away where I can't see it. Which is unfortunate, because I'm also now missing those three useful lights. Likewise, the keyboard has another annoying LED which lights, though not nearly as freneticly, to tell you that you're typing. Duh. Again, tune it down, make it dimmer, or put it where it doesn't constantly distract me.

Together, all three components are fairly light: I think they'd make an excellent set of things to bring on a longish business trip where you might be making presentations before clients. That's apparently one of the marketing angles. There have been many times where we've been using a projector, but the projector is no-where near the guy who has to be operating it. This keyboard/mouse combo would easily solve that problem.

And it's also just nice for regular use with my laptop, when I get tired of the normal scrunched keyboard.

Summary: I give it 4/5. I'm grateful someone finally did something like this: shortened, wireless keyboard and optical mouse combo. It could be improved by working batteries, more sensitive keys, getting rid of all the blasted flashing, and making the mouse buttons smaller. Other than that, a good system so far.