Kinesis Advantage360 Professional Split Mechanical Keyboard

Product Information

If the item comes direct from a manufacturer, it may be delivered in non-retail packaging, such as a plain or unprinted box or plastic bag. If you are in the US, or you can stomach even more cost when you factor in customs and taxes, Upgrade keyboards, in the US, can do you a totally custom build. Second, it literally saves you a whole row of mechanical switches which by itself is a large savings in any board.

Separate concave keywells position the arms at shoulder width to keep wrists straight and perpendicular. And, for now at least, while this board might not be perfect, if I was talking just hardware, this would probably take the crown as the best physical form for me. The keyboard's firmware is very flexible- you can remap all of the keys, and also do things like "mod tap" or "layer tap"- for example, when I tap the backspace key (one of the thumb buttons), it sends a backspace.

The Advantage360 is also equipped with tactile Brown mechanical key switches and the SmartSet Programming Engine. The disadvantage is that the backlight will not shine through the keycaps; however, I also don't care much about backlighting, and I would care if they were RGB.

And there is a handy on/off switch if you are travelling with your keyboard or want to ensure that it goes into deep sleep for maximum power conservation.Pneumatic mechanism moves the desk up and down by pressing a handle till you reach the perfect height. Not GPL, anyways), so it can be linked to a proprietary vendor Bluetooth driver blob, which is presumably why they chose it.

Whereas the keywells are designed to minimize hand movements, the clusters are spaced out far enough that most keys are hard to reach, and the keycap shapes and heights are all over the place.

The reality is that right now, it’s all cobbled together and doesn’t feel that different than managing your firmware as a hobbyist. Hanging around the r/ErgoMechKeyboards subreddit for a bit, there aren’t that many keyboards that feature a concave key layout like the Advantages, which is one of the reasons why some users swear by them. There is no doubt about it; wireless ZMK is simply not as reliable as wired with something like QMK. The way many of these keyboards work with layering makes it a functional requirement rather than a choice. I have sworn by Logitech wireless accessories for years because of their integrated wireless which presents to the OS as a regular USB device driver, so I can use the accessories in BIOS, during OS installations, etc without any hassle.

Kinesis has been at it for 25-30 years and seem to have a good idea of the trade-offs and have found an (probably local) optimum.

To Kinesis’s credit, their Advantage keyboards have always been laid out in ortholinear—essentially, a grid—fashion, and their products have had the Dvorak layout as an alternative to QWERTY. The Advantage360 may look big, but it actually has a smaller footprint than most keyboards because we eliminated the numeric 10-key so you can place the mouse closer to your body, reducing painful “over-reach”. Kinesis do two versions of this keyboard, the standard, which is a wired version, running their own software, and this wireless one, the ‘pro’, which runs ZMK software and is fully programmable, and for reasons I’ll get to, might have been more suitably named the ‘Expert’ version. Concave keywells are scooped into a bowl shaped to reduce hand and finger extension and to relax muscles.