I wonder about some of the keys being right up against each other and potentially being hard to differentiate.
Quite to the contrary, a curved key well makes it VERY easy to differentiate between keys. The angle of the keycap immediately tells your hand/fingers where they are.
II'm curious about the pricing ballpark also. The IC form references the Moonlander and Kinesis Advantage, hinting at a $350+ price point. I don't want to suggest it isn't worth that, but that also puts it in the ballpark of a handbuilt Dactyl Manuform which would offer more layout choices plus a much wider selection of switches and aftermarket keycaps. There's also the Keyboardio Model 100 in the same segment. (MX hotswap but you're locked into their custom-sculpt keycaps)
It is great that there are choices in the market
That's very healthy. I do want to point out:
- If ergonomics is what matters to you, I would like to toot the horn on the extreme level of ergonomics testing and design we have gone too. To get a truly good ergonomics design, one needs to iterate and try and again and again. There simply is not shortcut even with the best theories and ideas. As much as I love DM as a project, and the number of variants there are, I don't think any of the variants have gone through a comparable rigorous iterative process.
- Glove80 will be made with an injection molded case, and high quality POM keycaps. I have done more than my fair share of 3D printing, and no matter what printer one use (I use both SLA and FDM and they never stop), and no matter how careful one is, the quality simply cannot compare with injection molded parts.
- Glove80 has a lot of other features simply not found on many other keyboard. We will talk about them later. Palm Rest. Tenting. Custom mounting. Etc etc.
- If you have tried designing a contoured keyboard or built one, you would appreciate how complex, how much more effort, how much higher than cost is, to design and build a contoured keyboard compared to a flat keyboard. They are not even in the same ballpark in terms of difficulties. But of course it is all worth it in terms of comfort.
As for actual pricing, that is still something we need to work out with the factories. I am in no way making any suggestion of the price right now. However it is important to note that Glove80 is built by a bunch of geeks previously inflicted with RSI, and one of the primary goals is to bring the best ergonomics to everyone who needs it.
Most/all of what I just listed is not wireless, but wireless is not a huuuge feature for me.
There are a few benefits to wireless.
- To me, the biggest gain is a cleaner desk. My desk is already too full of clutter, and if I could get rid of the intra-half cable and the host cable, it is a huge win. Our earlier versions are wired, and we tried sooooo many types of cables, including non-standard custom. But none of them were satisfactory. TRRS for example would easily damage the controller board if you accidentally hot-plug/hot-detach it.
- It is now getting quite common to have multiple devices, such as a work laptop and a personal laptop. BLE functionality of supporting multi-device connections essentially saves you from having a KVM or multiple keyboards. => Less desk clutter
- Great when you are using in office, and you want to bring it to the meeting room, or a colleague's desk. One less thing to carry. One less thing to plug.
But I get that not everyone wants BLE - and that's fine. You can always connect with a USB cable.