THE QUEST
Since buying our first HDTV over a year and a half ago, we've had a back-burner project to add a Macintosh to our living room A/V rack. Actually, this has been a plan for a decade, since we first started looking at HDTVs in trade shows, wondering when their prices and performance would meet our budget and aesthetic judgement.
From time to time, there comes a task in which my wife and I need to participate concurrently on a computer, whether it's shopping for airfares, editing a new class syllabus or just researching something online. This is an awkward task at a desk, sharing monitors and finding a place to roll up a chair. Though we could be remotely viewing each other's computers over the network, this solution isn't practical when we watch long-form video on the computer together - something that's becoming more and more common in our life.
We keep an older PowerBook in our living room, and we use it daily to look up something we just heard about on television, or to continue working on a project in an alternate location to our office desks. In truth, using a laptop is actually a better solution to using a computer while watching television - if we use our television as a computer display, that precludes its concurrent use as a TV (our television doesn't support Picture-In-Picture, and this would probably take up too much desktop real estate anyway). Still, there are times when there's no substitute for big-display group-computing.
For whatever reason, there are very few wireless keyboards with any kind of pointing device (i.e., mouse, trackpad, trackball) built-in. Though there are wireless mice and trackballs, that means having to pass around, keep track of, and make room not one but two pieces floating around the living room. There are offerings with gamepad-like "rockers" cursor controllers, but that's not very appealing ergonomically.
EUREKA!
After years of shopping, buying and returning, we've found and bought a wireless keyboard with built-in pointing system that I like. It's the BTC 9019URF Wireless Multimedia Keyboard with Dual Mode Joystick Mouse. At $39.95, it's even a bargain.
THE KEYBOARD
The 9019URF has two big handles molded into either end - a fantastic design decision which works very well for cross-couch hand-offs. The 9019URF's pointing device is a mini-joystick. Reminiscent of the 1" tall analog joysticks on console gaming controllers, this is a perfectly usable mouse controller, falling perfectly to hand (more accurately, to the right thumb) when the user holds the keyboard by its handles. Also nicely placed are the left- and right-mouse buttons, which are positioned where the left thumb rests. Also surrounding the joystick are Scroll Up and Scroll Down buttons. Web page navigation is very natural, and clicking links and scrolling pages is accomplished with only the user's thumbs. A center-mouse button is in the extreme upper-right - very handy as I configure the Mac OS X's "Expose" window-tiling feature to this button.
The mini-joystick is a proportional controller, allowing the user to move the cursor at speeds from a crawl to rapidly zipping about the screen. Some adjustments to your system's mouse settings can help find a comfortable speed - in Mac OS 10.4, I found the maximum default speed a bit slow, and there was plenty of latitude for slower and faster configurations. I found the joystick very natural to use immediately. (BTC claims that the device can be used as a "joystick" as well as "mouse" controller, which would require installing the BTC drivers for Windows.)
The keyboard itself has pretty mediocre key switch feel - vaguely sticky. I wouldn't want to type for hours on the 9019URF, but it's serviceable.
Power for the 9019 is provided by two AA batteries - a pair of Duracells is included in the package. BTC documentation claims a battery life of "up to 5 months." They also claim a 10 meter (about 33 feet) maximum range.
WORKS FOR MAC... MOSTLY
The 9019URF is packaged as a Windows keyboard, but it works on a Mac, with only a few caveats. Many of the typical "multimedia and Internet" dedicated button array across the top of the keyboard have no effect in OS X. However, the Volume Up/Down, Mute, Eject, and Power buttons do work, as do all the aforementioned pointing and navigation keys.
Installation on a Mac (again, Mac OS is not mentioned as supported) was nothing - I didn't read the manual, installed two AA batteries in the keyboard, plugged the wireless transceiver's USB cable into a Mac (which asked to help identify the keyboard by pressing a few keys). That's it. Windows software on an included CD provides support for the multimedia/Internet keys.
MAC/WINDOWS MODIFIER KEY SWAP
As with all Windows keyboards on Macs (and vice-versa), the positions of the Option/Alt and Option/Command keys are reversed. In OS 10.4, Apple has cleverly added an optional Modifier Keys button and submenu to the Keyboard & Mouse pane of System Preferences (perhaps almost too clever - the Modifier Keys button doesn't appear on some systems unless an external keyboard is present). Using the Modifier Keys dialog, the user can reassign the four modifier keys to act as any other. Users of Mac OS versions prior to 10.4 can try utilities such as uControl (no longer supported, but still available) or fKeys to remap Windows keyboards for Macs.
NOTE: The 9019URF has no right-side modifier keys, but then neither do most laptops these days.
Manufacturer BTC also offers these wireless keyboards:
- The 9019URFIII appears very similar to the 9019URF except that it uses a small USB wireless adapter (like a thumb-drive) rather than the 9019URF's box-and-USB cable wireless transceiver.
- The BTC 9029URF III MCE, a sleeker keyboard with the same mini-joystick, but no handles (we immediately preferred the 9019's handles in the store).
- The 9116URF is much more compact than the 9019 and 9029, but lacks the handy handles.
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