need advice: ultranav vs m4-1 vs space saver ii?

[wellington1869]

Brian has a IBM made USB UltraNav here for $70, NIB.

sweet. Naturally he wants twice what he wanted for the ps2 version  Oh well. Nice board though.

Altho it is NIB.

[lowpoly]

Just want to confirm that an active usb converter will stop your drivers from working. You can only crank up your mouse settings. Not good if you want to use a mouse as well.

A passive adapter will only work if the keyboard controller recognizes and supports usb mode too. Worth a try but I haven't seen this work yet.

[wellington1869]

my usb ultranav arrived (that I swapped the ps/2 for), have to pick it up at the post office this afternoon.  looking forward to using the middle button scroll function, finally. yay for usb.
the ultranav is perfect as the bedside keyboard by the way. wristrests, built in mouse, very lightweight, and decent key action. even fits on my bed desk or over my laptop keyboard.

[wellington1869]

Update on the usb ultranav -
-thai-english keyboard, tho plug and play as a standard american board. (after the bing.com discount I think it came out to about $36 shipped).
-keys feel different from the ps/2 one, even tho this does say "IBM" on it. THey keys here are bouncier, maybe a touch stiffer.  Not bad feeling, just different, and not like the m4 I imagine. But solid keys to type on.
-overall construction is as IBM as you'd expect.
-on a mac, the only way to get the middle-button-scroll to work seems to be to buy "smart scroll" for $19.  Otherwise you dont have a mouse based scroll when its plugged into the mac.
-is recognized by osx and keyb/trackpoint/trackpad work normally.
-on a mac, surprisingly, without any driver or etc being available, the volume up/down/mute buttons on the ultranav DO work.

I'm too cheap to shell out $19 so i'm making do without mouse-based scrolling for now when using the ultranav on the mac. (Supposedly if you use firefox instead of safari, the middle button scrolling works, tho i havent tested this since i mostly use safari).  Other than that though, its pretty brilliant even on a mac.  Havent tried it on the pc yet but i assume the ultranav driver mentioned in this thread above will work without any issues.

Update on pc side:
The usb driver worked perfectly.
From this main driver page:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-61982
I wound up here:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-60649
Which is the "usb travel ultranav" driver page.
Selected the driver for touchpad/trackpoint (Two versions, one with thinkpad hotkeys, one without. Since i'm using this on a dell, I chose the one without).

download, unpack, install, reboot. Everything works - volume keys, middle button scroll, etc. A trackpoint icon appears in the system tray soon as its plugged in. Lots of settings to modify. I wound up turning off the touchpad since the trackpoint is such a joy to use.

The IBM trackpoint is a marvel of ergonomics engineering.

[lowpoly]

For Firefox there's also the ScrollbarAnywhere extension. Allows scrolling by pressing the right mouse button.

[wellington1869]

Does anyone know the switch technology in the ultranav?  I know the spacesaver II is heavy rubber domes and the m4 is buckling rubber sleeves, but what is the ultranav? Scissor switches? I'm afraid to pop a key for fear that it'll be hard to replace (as I read on a forum while googling this question).

[wellington1869]

Does anyone know the switch technology in the ultranav?  I know the spacesaver II is heavy rubber domes and the m4 is buckling rubber sleeves, but what is the ultranav? Scissor switches? I'm afraid to pop a key for fear that it'll be hard to replace (as I read on a forum while googling this question).

searching geekhack archives gives some posible answers:

"scissor-stabilized rubber dome switches" from this thread.

"By the time the X31 came out, IBM had been using scissor switches for quite a while. It's just a really good implementation" from this thread