product review - iFrog one-handed keyboard

On March 8th, I had surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff and labrum in my right shoulder. I'm right-handed, and now I'm mostly without the use of my right arm until physical therapy can return me to using my dominant arm. To help maintain my sanity, not to mention keeping me from incurring further damage, I purchased an iFrog.

The iFrog is a one-handed chording keyboard, and comes in left- and right-handed variants. It has a total of 20 keys, which give you roughly everything that you want out of a keyboard. 15 letters are usable without any kind of modification. The rest require you to press two keys at once. For example, to get that X back there, I had to hold down two keys.

Learning to use this has mostly been a question of breaking my own habits. I learned how to touch-type on a standard QWERTY keyboard when I was 10. So switching to something where none of the keys are where I expect them to be has been challenging. I frequently type a D instead of an A because the D is below my left pinky finger. I'm not quite touch-typing yet, although I'm getting closer. Perhaps by the end of the week.

I have a few complaints about my iFrog. Mine didn't ship with the documentation or tutorial CD, which has meant that I've had to puzzle out a lot of things (such as which key combination is the command key). In January, I emailed the company to ask for a replacement CD, but nothing has arrived. The cover is difficult to put on properly. The recharging cable is hard to plug into the device when you're one-handed. It doesn't sit flat, there's a very slight unevenness to the bottom. If it were a table in a restaurant, I'd put a matchbook under the wobbly leg.

But it's making it possible for me to use my computer. Typing on it is faster than left-handed hunting-and-pecking on my QWERTY keyboards. Whether I continue to use it when I can use my right arm remains to be seen, but I've got a few weeks before that. I'm using the iFrog exclusively until then.