If you’re a fan of Flip 3D, you’ll like Microsoft‘s new cordless keyboard-and-mouse combo. The keyboard has a dedicated key — to the right of the space bar, between Alt and the context-menu key — that summons Windows’ shuffle-stack of active application screens. Pressing the key repeatedly cycles through the screens; pressing Enter brings a program to the foreground. Prefer not to press a key? Clicking the mouse wheel launches Flip 3D too, with a left-click to pick an application. Clearly Microsoft wants those of us still using Alt-Tab to shape up.
Of course there’s more to the Wireless Comfort Desktop 5000 than Flip 3D (for one thing, the supplied driver software lets you reassign both the key and wheel click to different functions if you like). As its name implies, the $80 desk set is designed to be comfortable, if not as explicitly ergonomic as Microsoft’s split-design Natural keyboards: While the left and right halves of the keyboard aren’t separated, the keys are arranged in a gentle 6-degree curve or smile pattern that the company says encourages natural wrist posture without the learning curve of a split keyboard.
The 8.3-by-18.1-inch keyboard also sports a generous palm rest and detachable feet. The latter can elevate either the board’s rear edge, for the slight uphill tilt that most PC typists prefer, or the front, for the wrist-cocking negative or downhill slope that ergonomists say is optimal. (If you like a flat keyboard, as we do, you drop the feet in the wastebasket.)
An F Lock key toggles the function keys between their usual F1-through-F12 duties and shortcuts to open, close, save, or print files; reply to, forward, or send e-mails; and other operations. Above them, a row of special keys stretches the width of the keyboard. Five launch your browser, Windows Mail, Windows Media Player, and the My Documents and My Pictures folders; two zoom in and out of images or documents; six perform play/pause, previous/next track, and volume up, down, and mute functions for multimedia applications.
That leaves five My Favorites shortcut keys that launch programs, folders, or Web pages of your choice … at least until Windows 7 comes along, when Microsoft says they’ll become Taskbar Favorites keys that map to the location of applications on the new operating system’s taskbar, even changing as you click and drag to change icons’ order. Shades of, well, Flip 3D, kind of.
Symmetrical Style
The rodent half of the Comfort Desktop 5000 is a full-sized (2.8 by 4.6 inches), ambidextrous mouse with four-way scrolling — the wheel spins smoothly (with no clicks or detents) for vertical and tilts left and right for horizontal scroll maneuvers.
Besides the main left and right buttons and click wheel, there are two side buttons, one per side, well positioned for a click or slight squeeze by thumb and ring finger, respectively. By default, these are for Back and Forward navigation in a browser, though Microsoft’s driver lets you reassign them to one of some three dozen common functions or to a macro or application launch of your choice.
The mouse boasts the BlueTrack technology introduced on Microsoft’s flagship Explorer Mouse last December, a blue-hued variation on LED optical design that uses a broader beam and enhanced imaging optics to work on a greater variety of surfaces with no mouse pad required. Both rough or textured surfaces such as fabric and carpeting and smooth or glossy ones such as tile and photo paper worked fine in our tests, though BlueTrack won’t work on glass or mirrored surfaces.
The mouse and keyboard use the same small USB transceiver, with none of the painstaking pairing of devices or pressing of Connect buttons that’s often part of wireless peripheral setup, although they wouldn’t work on our 64-bit Vista Home Premium system until we’d installed their IntelliPoint and IntelliType driver software. Other cordless keyboards and mice we’ve tested have provided at least basic functionality, though usually not special keys or button functions, as soon as plugged in, before driver installation.
Of the two, we preferred the Wireless Comfort Desktop mouse to the keyboard. The former has a simple, elegant design, with side buttons perfectly placed for access without having to move one’s hand. The latter takes a firm, almost heavy typing touch; we got used to that in time, but found ourselves repeatedly grousing about the Esc key — though it’s one of the keys we use most often, it’s tiny, the same half-a-key size as F1 through F12, and mounted almost flush with the keyboard. The combination is difficult to hit, feeling almost recessed or hidden behind the tilde key.
But with that gripe aside, the Wireless Comfort Desktop 5000 is a handy control center, combining ergonomic credentials with an ample array of shortcuts and customization options. It’s appealing today, and will be more so when Windows 7 arrives.
| HardwareCentral Intelligence |
| Microsoft Wireless Comfort Desktop 5000 Microsoft $80 Available: NowOn a 5-star scale: Features:  Performance: Value: Total: 12 out of 15 |