Kinesis Advantage 2 Full Review after Heavy Usage

hello everybody my name is alan underwood with codingblocks.net and in this video i'm going to do my first in a series of ergonomic keyboard reviews and hopefully you'll enjoy these so first a little bit of a little bit of stuff to get out of the way if you're curious about a couple of questions or things that people have hit me with statements that people have made about these keyboards one about being off i go to this extreme keyboard i can't go back or my thoughts on price of these things i have another video up here just click that link go over and listen to it you can watch it after this if you want whatever all right so i've debated so many times on how to do this particular review and i think the first thing i want to do and i may do this with all the keyboards is i'm going to tell you up front what my my opinion right now is and then i'll go into the features and how i got to this opinion afterwards and then that way you don't have to wait till the end so that's it the kinesis advantage 2 love this keyboard is it worth 320 or 330 bucks whatever it is on amazon you can check the links down in the description the price will be there but um yeah i would buy this keyboard in a heartbeat and yes i truly do love this keyboard it's one of my very favorite keyboards i've ever used and yeah i mean that's that's about as straightforward as i can be right there um is it for everybody probably not and the main people that it wouldn't be for are people who travel a lot they want to be able to take something with them portability wise and people that do not type properly meaning you don't have your fingers on or at least really near to the home row of buttons that may not be a thing so outside of that if you type a whole lot this is an amazing keyboard so with that out of the way you now know up front what it is you don't have to fast forward to the end to get to it if you want to know how i got there and why i feel that way now i'll give you the rest of that information so i'm going to start real quick though with with something that was a little bit funny when you typically pay you know three 300 and plus dollars for something you usually want to sort of be wild when you get the thing right like you're excited about it there's an anticipation waiting for it to come from amazon or whatever and then you get this you get a big white box and that is about as anti-climatic as i can possibly even tell you like it's insane and when you open it up like you're like surely when you open this there's going to be some gloriousness in here right no no just more white box really nothing very exciting so that was a lot now but you know i told myself you know that's just the unboxing so self get over it and let's look forward to what this keyboard has to offer the first thing you need to know is this keyboard is a journey you are not going to pick it up and be productive on it quickly it may it probably won't just be a week probably won't just be two weeks chances are it's going to take you three or four weeks before you're comfortable with this keyboard it's not like other ergonomic keyboards if you're like hey i type on a split ergo keyboard already this is going to be fine i've been typing on a split ergo keyboard for the past 15 years and this thing hurt me so just be aware you have to be in for for the long haul um so that out of the way day one i might have gotten 10 words a minute maybe and that was with a lot of just you know deep breaths closing your eyes like who's faba if you know that reference like it was a whole lot of frustration right and it carried on that way through the end of week one at the end of week one i was probably up to about 20 words a minute with a whole lot of errors right week two started off you know made it through the second week and i might have been up to 40 words a minute again also with with just a crazy amount of errors oh and it's worth saying typically i type anywhere on any given day between 80 and 100 words a minute usually with maybe one error usually i'm pretty good about that and so my 80 to 100 words a minute includes me backspacing over and fixing things so so that said you know 20 words to 40 words like i'm still at less than half of my productivity that i'm used to at the end of week three i was probably up to about 60 words a minute but i was starting to feel a little bit more comfortable it was week four when it finally there was like a switch that went off in my head and and in week four like starting that week i just started feeling comfortable and things started becoming way more fluid to me so by the end of week four it felt right to me and i was back up into the 90 words a minute category and doing it without having to look down at the keyboard much at all right like it just started flowing so that was that was hard for me and just to be up front i only unplugged this keyboard one time and it was on day one or day two and i only did it because i had a call with an external customer where i was going to be doing some things on screen and i didn't want to look like i didn't know how to type right because they can't see that you got this crazy looking keyboard in front of you you can just see that you can't do anything and so i unplugged the keyboard for like an hour just so that i wouldn't look like a before i went back to my regular daily routine of being frustrated and breathing hard and yelling at the yelling at the table like seriously i think there were times my wife looked over at me like are you okay i'm like no i'm really not i'm not i'm struggling so um yeah it was it was a rough time like i'm getting hot right now thinking about it because it was it was a stressful point in my life so oh at any rate that was a bit of the journey right so now that i've told you that let me talk about some of the things on this keyboard that i love so i'm gonna grab it the first thing i'm gonna tell you about you're gonna think i'm crazy it's got nothing to do with the keys got nothing to do with this insane layout none of that it's got to do with this big hole in the back of it so i love that so i i don't know if i'm going to include a shot of my desk right now with all the wires that are everywhere it's a little disturbing it's a little frustrating i've got cables all over the place i've got microphones i've got keyboards i've got cameras there's there's garbage everywhere right this little cavern on the back of this thing is fantastic for hiding wires so when this thing was on my desk i would take all the wires and cram them right up underneath there and it almost looked like i had a clean desk that was amazing to me so one of those little things that was a side benefit so i guess now then i should probably talk about the features that they want you to know about and i'll tell you my thoughts on them so the first one are these con concave key wells that they have here yeah that's that's um that's a major feature and we'll talk about that more in a little bit also i don't know how well it's going to show up here i'll probably have another shot of this in the video that i clip in but they called them the sculpted home keys and basically instead of the keys being in a straight line like they are on most keyboards they curve just like your fingers do and believe it or not that makes a massive difference and then another thing they do is the keys don't go off to angles from the home row up to the top row to the bottom row they don't go off at angles they're they're in vertical rows they're called i think they call them ortho dynamic or i don't remember at any rate that i think that's a headphone thing anyway they uh they are in straight lines and that actually matters a lot we'll get into that here in a little bit um some of the other features man like these this was my first experience with a keyboard to where they had multiple keys for your thumbs i never realized how under utilized my thumbs were and and how just abandoned they must have felt over the years because they've always been you know relegated to space bar bumpers and honestly this thing's a game changer and and the reason it is is not just because they put the keys there in the first place it's the layout of the keys they just make sense mentally so for instance the backspace button is on the left thumb and when you go back you go to the left at least in the english language right and the the space button is on the right thumb and when you want to go a space you're going to the right so they just they map out mentally perfectly right and then the additional keys that are around there are just in a good enough spot to where it doesn't take a lot of movement or effort to hit those keys on the keyboard and it just it just works so well and again i just never knew how much more capable my thumbs were on a device until i got this thing so then that brings me up to some of my other favorite features on this so we talk about the concave we talk about all that it's also got tinting which means that your hands are at a bit of an angle so combined with that angle and also with the concave keys your hands just kind of sit in there cupped which believe it or not is incredibly comfortable like instead of i i don't know how to explain it they just fit they just they they sit in there perfectly um the the other features of this keyboard that i really like that they that they try and sell is the ability to switch between keyboard modes and by that i mean they've got like layouts for mac they've got one for windows and they've got one for pc the pc one's kind of funny you're going to wonder just like i did well what's the difference between pc and windows really they just jettison the windows button and the command button for mac so really you just have control on all buttons it it's that's really what it boils down to but the fact that you can switch between these things quickly with like two key button presses is amazing and it is for me especially because i work on macs during the day most of the time and i switch to windows quite a bit as well so i'm constantly back and forth between the the two os's and being able to do that quickly is is just amazing so another feature that i really really like about this keyboard is the ability to remap keys from one place to another on the keyboard simply using the keyboard you don't have to crack open any software it's not like it only works on windows or mac or whatever you can do it directly on the hardware and why this is important is because for whatever reason the way that they have the thumb close the thumb cluster top row key setup they work out perfectly for windows for mac personally i don't like their setup and i'll tell you why so as a developer one of the key combinations that i do quite a bit especially on windows so if if you're in visual studio code or visual studio on windows i use the control key and the left right arrows to move between words quickly so if you if you've never done that you know you should try that out now but holding down the control key and doing the left arrow will move you back a word at a time right so in between spaces it always takes you to the beginning of the next word or the beginning of the previous word if you use the right arrow and the control key then it takes you to the beginning of the next word so it just jumps between words it can save you a lot of keystrokes a lot of time well on mac they don't use the control key for that they use the option key or the alt key so it's alt and arrow left and right well unfortunately the left and right arrow keys are your middle and your left index fingers and that alt key is the top row thumb cluster button that's over to the right and so that means you got to pick your hand up and kind of shift it out of the way and then you got to stretch with some other fingers to try and hit those arrow keys and it's just really uncomfortable and it takes away from what they've tried to create here which is a place where you can kind of keep your hands in one spot and do everything you need to do so that remap function comes in great for me because what i do is that top right the left thumb top right um control button or whatever i remap that to the top right thumb button and then that way if i need to do that control arrow thing i can easily reach up tap it with my right thumb and then i can use my left index and middle fingers to move the left and right and it works perfectly i remap it every time now that brings me to something that's not so fantastic and that is if you switch back and forth between mac and windows you lose those key remappings that you did so if i change some key mappings from my mac and then i go over to windows then i come back to mac i have to remap those well they have software yeah i can't remember the name of it sort of irrelevant it's on their website maybe i'll have it in the description here so you can get to it but you can download their software you can remap everything visually using a visual keyboard layout they'll put it in front of you you can tell it which keys you want where and the benefit of doing it that way is i only remap a key or two if you're somebody that remaps mini keys that's a really nice way to be able to go in there do a whole set of them hit save and the next time that you want to do that all you have to do is load up that profile and say hey put that in the keyboard now you might say well why would you need to remap many keys i'm glad you asked so one of the guys i work with he we were talking about keyboards one day he's like yeah i've got the kinesis advantage too i was like oh that's awesome i'm actually you know going through hell right now trying to learn this thing and and basically what it came down to is the reason why he uses this keyboard is for one you don't have to move your fingers very far but two he has a problem with the tendons and the ligaments from his fingers to where if he has to stretch his fingers much to reach keys he gets tremendous pain in his arm he's been to doctors he's talked to people about this all kinds of things and this keyboard both the fact that it brings the keys closer together so you don't have to move your fingers as much with the ability to remap the keys he can move the keys as a developer that we use a lot like the minus and the equals and all those type of things and closer so he can move those keys out of the way of where they are bring them in closer so that he doesn't have to stretch his fingers so now the keys that he almost never use those things he can relegate and push out to the edges and bring the other ones closer in so his remapping needs make it to where he can do this and he said honestly before he got this keyboard he was considering just not even being a developer anymore because the pain was that bad so the fact that he's even able to do that with this type of layout it's amazing and that brings me to another thing this thing ships with a key puller so you can just pop that thing down on these keys pull them off and move them to where you want them to be so it's not like you have to look at the keyboard and say oh i have to remember that i moved the minus key over here or whatever you can actually move the keys right so huge huge thing um a couple other things that i really do like about this is so first let me say i got the cherry mx quiet reds i think is what they're called so this is what they sound like it's not silent but they're not obnoxiously left so if you are somebody that works in an office and or even in a room with somebody else that that's going to be sitting next to you around you while you're working on your computer uh if if you want to be nice you should probably get the quiet ones the so yes they don't have the clickety popcorn sounding type stuff that the cherry mx browns have but they are also a lot friendlier however one of the cool features of this is there's the ability to turn on this click tone to where when you type you kind of get that clickety sound so if there's nobody in the room or there's nobody around and you just want some more noise you could do that and it's kind of fun however there is again going back to the other guy that that has the ligament problems he actually used it for a legit reason other than just being having a smile on his face when he clicked the keys and it was when he'd type he also needed to do it where he wasn't exerting so much pressure on every key press and so having that click tone sort of programs your brain while you're doing this to know where that pressure point is for that key to register and so he used those click tones to help help him get into that mode and understand the keyboard and then you can turn it off and now he can more touch type and get the same results that he needed to so that's also a killer feature another feature of this keyboard that i really like that honestly i have not had a chance to use yet and i think it's just because i don't know i just didn't think about it um is you can program macros into this keyboard so gamers out there you're gonna be familiar with this right like i don't know you playing street fighter or some fighting game that probably just aged me a little bit but you know you want to throw a fireball you can just hit a button on the keyboard right and it does it so the cool part with the macros on this is it can be played back at nine different speeds and i think they equate it to words per minute i don't remember what the brackets were but it was like 40 words per minute 85 120 something like that right but it can go insanely fast well think about this as a developer there's a lot of code that you type that is sort of redundant whether it's a for loop or some sort of if block or anything like that what if you put some macros in that say hey i want i want a c sharp iteration type thing right like a for each or something and you just hit a macro key and boom it spits it out right like it's almost like templating and something like visual studio or anything like that except built into your keyboard it's kind of sweet so now let me talk about some of the things that drove me crazy with this keyboard and and yeah all right so let me get into it so the first one is when i unboxed it i told you about that super unexciting unboxing i got it out and you'll notice here that i've got a nice shiny surface here and this is where my wrists have gone so one of the things that really bugged me is i was like i cannot believe they don't have wrist pads on this thing right like why why would they ship me a keyboard that costs this much money and i have a wrist pad on it well apparently in my haste to jettison the white box um i didn't look in there so in that box you know what's in there guess what there's some wrist pads i have not put them on there because i want to do this review first also in there you have the key puller and then the additional keycaps for the windows mac and pc layouts but that said i didn't put the i didn't put the pads on there before this review because i wanted to be fair in what i've actually been experiencing and there is something interesting about this so in the time that i've typed on this probably about six weeks in total because i wanted to make sure i gave it a good go before i either threw it out the window or fell in love with it and in that time i don't recall my wrist ever hurting whereas if if you're working on just some regular keyboard that had a hump on it chances are you're going to put some pressure down on there and you're going to feel it well because of the way the concave setup is for those keys your hands are kind of curled more like this so you take the pressure off of them because you're lifting up your hand a little bit more and so i never noticed that fatigue and that stress on my wrist which is really interesting now don't get me wrong now that i know that i got those pads in there you know they're going to go on here but i did want to save that until after this review um so getting back to the next thing that drove me absolutely batty and this was part of the the frustration trying to learn this keyboard is i mentioned that the keys and i'll probably have a better picture of this in the video here but the keys they're in this concave thing when they did that they also put them super close together so it's amazing because so just to point out my hand from the from the edge of my thumb pad here to the tip of my finger is eight inches so that's probably about an average size hand for a man right like i don't have massive fingers i don't have super long fingers my hands are just regular size without any effort i can reach every key on this keyboard except this top row of function keys barely moving my fingers like i'm talking about they just crawl around on the keyboard like this whereas on a regular keyboard you're stretching quite a bit more and moving you're moving your fingers more like this instead of like this so it's really really thought out and laid out well but there is one major caveat and this is why week one i almost melted it down and got my money back out of the plastic so because the keys are so close together unlike regular keyboards where the where the arrow clusters are over to the right usually to the right of the shift button on your right hand no no they put these arrow buttons right up underneath where your index and your middle finger are on both hands so on your left hand it's under the c and the v that's your left and your right and on your right hand it's under the m and the um less than sign for your up and down arrows so what i would do inevitably all day long for weeks was i'd be in the middle of type in a sentence and i'd reach down to type the c or the v and i'd hit the arrow key and all of a sudden instead of having a word that people could read i had some sort of klingon show up on on my screen and it was incredibly frustrating what was worse was when i wasn't typing sentences and i was trying to type code i'd be in the middle of typing something and i'd be on another line jacking up another line of code somewhere because i hit the up arrow or i hit the down arrow or at the left or the right it was maddening i will tell you i learned where control and command z were quicker than any other combination on any keyboard i've ever used so just know that with that clustering of the keys being so much closer which really is a fantastic design it will come with some stress but after you get used to it it just feels right like it's so easy to type on this thing now that brings me to my next quip and this drives me crazy still today i i don't have a problem typing these keys but don't get it so i told you that the backspace and the forward space those are in the right spots right there's the left thumb and the right thumb why did they put the plus at the top left of the keyboard and the minus at the top right when things go down they are minusing that's on your left when things are going up they're plusing that's on the right why switch them like i don't i i think i know why they did it because on a regular keyboard the minus comes to the left of the plus but i don't care if you're going to move every other key on the keyboard wherever you want it you could have put those in a place that made sense too matter of fact i might keep all these things and do it now that i'm thinking about it but so all that said this thing is truly an amazing keyboard oh i do have to tell you so um this little thing on here where it looks like it comes with some aol dial up as michael outlaw pointed out i don't know if i've gotten the video up yet or not but if i haven't you'll see it in the future it's pretty funny um this is actually for hooking up a key or not a key a foot a foot pedal type thing for being able to do you know modifier keys and stuff i don't have that because i don't plan on typing with my feet or using my feet in any portion of my typing um there there was one other thing that's coming to me i'll have it in a moment um what was the other thing oh oh in their marketing that they have online i found this comical they make this thing as portable there ain't nothing portable about this device it is massive man it's it's huge like i guess i guess it's not fair to call it huge i think it's only about 16 inches wide the problem is it's 16 inches wide and 14 inches deep so it's like a block right it's super light which is surprising you look at this thing and you expect to like you know be working out with it in between in between doing typing you know you can do some curls it's super lightweight it's well designed and constructed but it'll take up an entire backpack so if you're somebody that travels like you you go on flights to places all the time or if you're looking to take this with you as the thing that you're going to plug into your laptop to work with it's going to take up a ton of space so unless you're willing to throw it in there and take up you know the size of a pair of jeans in your in your suitcase chances are you're not going to want to travel with this thing but outside of that i can't think of any other real reason not to recommend this thing like the price yeah you you know 320 330 depending and again this is always frustrating if you go on amazon which will have a link in the description if you go on amazon the prices fluctuate i've seen it anywhere from like 3 10 to 3 30 and and sometimes depending on the keys that you get whether or not you get the the quiet mx reds like i've got here or if you get the clickety mx browns there'll be a price difference on those knowing that those key caps didn't cost any different amount for any of them but but at any rate um yeah i can wholeheartedly recommend this keyboard for anybody looking to to get a better typing experience i mean it feels so fluid just know you gotta buy into it and when i say buy into it that means you're gonna have to put the time in and the frustration and you're gonna have to breathe through the sweats and all the stress and the anxiety that it creates in you for the first few weeks before you get to the point to where you will enjoy this and actually start to to look forward to typing onto it which which is weird for me to say because i do a lot of typing but i actually enjoyed using this keyboard so um it's one of my very favorite keyboards i've ever used and i believe it comes with a three year warranty which is a massive aw just an awesome thing and yeah i can't i can't give it a higher recommendation what i have it's one of my favorite input devices so that is my super long-winded um detailed description of the kinesis advantage 2. um you know hopefully i covered every possible thing that there is i'm sure i forgot something i'm going to be like oh i need to record this review for the 20th time because i think i'm on like 19 now so at any rate if you have any questions if i missed anything uh please do leave me a comment below if you enjoyed this leave me a thumbs up and if you want if you're looking forward to more of the reviews coming subscribe to the channel and hit that bell down there to be notified when more coming out right now on my desk so this thing i haven't been using it for a couple of weeks now what i have had now is the zergotech oh oh also worth noting we paid for this right like we paid this is our money we paid for it no bias all these reviews will be completely well they'll be biased they'll be biased by me but they won't be biased because anybody sent them to us or anything like that so just know these these are our honest reviews on everything right as in depth all the good the bad the ugly everything in between so that's it if you're looking forward to some more of these things like i said i got the zergotech on my desk been using that for a couple of weeks it's got some really interesting features on it and looking forward to doing that review as well so again hope you enjoyed this hey if you are a developer or you know i don't know maybe you just want to listen to people talk about some nerdy stuff you should check out our podcast at codingblocks.net we are on itunes spotify stitcher everywhere so um yeah if you want to get some more good content to fill up your brain while you're driving around or whatever go check that out so again my name is alan underwood hope you enjoyed this and i will be back soon with more

Channel: Coding Blocks

Views: 53,126

Keywords: ergonomic keyboard, ergonomic keyboards, kinesis, best keyboard

Id: ZTFeus_wx1Q

Length: 31min 20sec (1880 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021