Microsoft Natural 4000 Black Wired Keyboard By Baseline on Dec 13, 2007 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

Ahh, another ergonomic keyboard from Microsoft. This one, in it's lovely black with silver trim color, is one of the better-selling ergonomics at the moment. I picked this one up a few months ago off of Amazon. What can I say? It's a keyboard! Ofcourse, it's not one of those fancy gaming keyboards that guarantees you can smash every button at once and it will register. In fact, I tried with this keyboard, and it ended up only allowing 6 key presses at one time. Anymore than that and it just didn't register them.

The extra buttons for favorite, mail, browser will come in handy if you grow used to them, but I find myself falling back on hold habits and just clicking the icons in my quick launch. Though I do find myself hitting the calculator button since it is close to the num pad. The mute volume button comes in handy as well at times.

Now, I do have one HUGE gripe. The build quality. Mechanically the keyboard is just fine. It's fairly quiet, the buttons aren't ridiculously hard to press, though they do require a bit more pressure than I'd like. However, the white decals on the keys don't seem to be built to last very long. As I said I only received this keyboard months ago, and already my the white decal that lets me know my right shift key is, well, my right shift key, is fading. Infact, Shift is just about completely gone off of that key except for some remains of the very top and bottom of the lettering. Maybe I just got a poorly done shift-key decal on my board, as the rest of the keys look pristine, though the S key is starting to show some fading now too. This should not happen for at least 2 years on a quality board!

Aside from the decal issue, this board is great.