Belkin F8U1500 IR Universal Wireless Keyboard
by Belkin Components

List Price: $69.99
Our Price: $22.00
You Save: $47.99 (69%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Category: CE
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Digital Photo Product Details

• Wireless connectivity
• Generous key spacing and comfortable key travel
• Quick-start keyboard application keys
• Works with most Palm devices and Pocket PCs
• Universal IR Wireless

Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Belkin F8U1500 IR Universal Wireless Keyboard

Customer Review: Goodbye to graffiti, sayonara to stylus!
Summary: 4 Stars

The instructions are a little vague about initial setup. You cannot just position the keyboard anywhere but rather there is a stand that allows you to place your PDA almost vertical and then you must adjust the mirror so that your PDA can receive the signals from the IR light on the keyboard that is above the 5 key. Don't worry if the IR light bulb on the keyboard does not appear to be on. Infrared light is not visible to the naked eye.

Once the unit is set up you press both of the shift keys at the same time and if and when the PDA receives a signal, it displays a small red icon at the bottom of the screen. If you don't get the red icon, reposition the mirror and/or the PDA stand. Once you see the red icon, you are ready to type. However, you can't be moving the stand or the PDA around or you can lose the connection.

If you ever find you can't get the connection, make sure to go into the keyboard software and enable the keyboard. I pressed the function key combination to rotate the screen and since WordSmith does not support rotation, the unit froze and the Belkin keyboard software (on the Clie) was not enabled after the reset so I went back and enabled it and it was okay.

There is no need to pound the keyboard. You can just touch the keys and they respond nicely. I use my right thumb but you can also use your left thumb for a space. I have fairly large hands but am quickly getting use to the keys. I would say I can type about 80-85 % as fast as I can with a regular keyboard. With a little practice I am sure I will be close to 100%.

The keys and their placement is much the same as the standard QWERTY keyboard but of course all the keys are a little small. As with other keyboards, the F and J keys have small protrusions which allow you to find the home keys without looking.

The space bar is split down the middle, which gives your two space bars.
Each key is about 1/2 " by 1/2 ". The unit (unfolded) is 10 ½ by 3 ¾ and a little more than ½ inch thick. It folds in half to 5 ¼ inches long and weighs in at about a½ a pound, however, that does not bother me as It feels quite sturdy.

There are 4 special shortcut keys on the right hand side which bring up the TODO the ADDRESS and APPOINTMENT Calendar and MEMOS

Together with the Function key, these keys also give you Find, Home, Calculatir, and the drop down menus from the application you are in. If there is more than one drop down menu you can use the arrow keys to navigate through them.

There are also many other keys that work together with the function key and which are accessed by pressing the FN key + one other keys which do the following: DONE, DELETE, PAGE UP, PAGE DOWN, CANCEL, OFF, OK and TODAY/NEW and a few other things.

The combination FN + * toggles the Clie's screen between mono mode and color.

The keyboard comes with a three year warranty which is quite impressive.

I also want to point out that before I purchased this unit at amazon.com, I sent a note to Belkin technical support to ask them if the Sony Clie SJ 22 was compatible with their keyboard as someone had posted a review saying it was not.

Support emailed me the next day and said it was compatible, and that the person who wrote the review must have had the wrong driver.

I don't think that was her problem. The stand and he mirror must be set up properly. A battery must be put in. Software must be installed on the PC and then synced to put the keyboard software on the PDA. I used the software that came on the CD Rom that came with the keyboard.

There are a few drawbacks that may or may not be unique to the Sony Clie.

1) The caps lock seems to go on from time to time and I am not sure whether that is because I am inadvertently touching it by accident or not.

2) Every now and then a key starts repeating but if you press any key when it does this, it will stop the repeating. This may be the fault of the WordSmith program. In fact both may be, I am not sure.

(Downloading and installing the latest driver did not correct these two anomalies).

I give it 4 stars because of the 2 drawbacks I mentioned above. I can live with them because the only thing I need my stylus for anymore is to run a non standard Palm program.

Description of Belkin F8U1500 IR Universal Wireless Keyboard