>If you're a good touch-typist it takes about 2 hours to get used to these keyboards - most of that time spent in teaching yourself to relax your wrists and shoulders rather than scrunch them together like you need to for conventional keyboards. The only thing I don't like about the keyboard is that MS decided to put the "6" key to the left rather than the right; this means that your left index finger has to handle 4,5, and 6, while the right one does just 7. If you've been touch-typing on a conventional keyboard it takes some time to get used to that - your right index finger pounding the gap when you want a "6" :)
>
>Durability of my keyboards has been excellent. My daily driver is 9 years old; my other one is 15 years old, and was the daily driver until #2 came along.

One if the more long-lived products, if you look at the product specs:

Computer/Operating System
One of the following:
# Windows® version 3.1 or later
# Windows NT® Workstation or Server version 3.51 or later
# Microsoft MS-DOS® version 3.1 or later
Connectivity An available PS/2 or Universal Serial Bus (USB) port (USB requires Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows 98)

I still have two with the insert-scroll dwn buttons alined horizontally -
these buttons get heavy usage over here and I could not switch to the 3 row layout -
bought one of those and sold it again. But I'm hooked to the big split.
Left hand use is for irrelevant scratching while numbers are being entered
via numbers board at the right ;-)

Will probably have to get half a dozen soon as my bunch is getting older
before they stop selling the line - perhaps I can retool my habits if all my keyboards
have the 3*2 layout...

regards

thomas