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When I first got this keyboard /mouse combination, I was a little excited. I've always had a problem with the layout of most keyboards. If you set up your system ergonomically, you should be sitting directly in front of the center of the computer screen and your keyboard should be centered under your hands. If you do that, then the cursor keys and numeric keypad stick out to the right and cover half of your mousing area. When you have a small desk space as I do, this becomes a problem.
When my iBook was my only machine, "too much keyboard" was never a problem because it only has the "qwerty" area of the keyboard, centered in front of the screen. That's what made me think "Wouldn't it be great if you could get a desktop keyboard that only had the same keys as a laptop keyboard?" So that's why I was a little excited by this Zippy keyboard - because it's just a laptop keyboard disguised as a desktop keyboard. That's also why I'm disappointed that it doesn't work.
The Odyssey 2620 includes the wireless keyboard, the wireless mouse and the wireless receiver. It also comes with batteries for the keyboard and rechargeable batteries and a charger for the mouse. What didn't come in the box were any instructions. Since it's made for Windows I was counting on Apple for any compatibility I might get.
I plugged the wireless adapter into my iBook and turned on the keyboard and mouse and the Mac OS immediately detected a new keyboard. I was instructed to press "the key to the right of the left shift key," (that's the "z" key on most keyboards) and it began to look up the keyboard type. While it was searching I decided to go to my iMac and try to find instructions or documentation on the Internet. There was none at the company's website (http://www.zippy.com) and the message boards I'd checked hadn't used this particular model. I went back to my iBook and after 90 minutes it was still looking up the keyboard. I force quit the installer, restarted and tried again. This time I gave up after half an hour.
I tried again on my iMac. I had a little better luck, but still no joy. The iMac running Tiger failed to match it, but it told me so in under 30 minutes. No crash, no lock up - OS X behaved just the way it was supposed to. The keyboard, however, did not. I contacted Zippy via e-mail; they just told me to "make sure the batteries were fresh, try another USB port and restart." None of that helped. Finally I asked a friend to try it on his Dell PC tower. He had better luck than me. The keyboard showed up, but some of the keys didn't work. None of the five specialty keys worked (launch browser, mail program, favorites folder, sleep and power up).
I regret having to rate this only one star, since I never got to the point of actually evaluating it. But even under Windows it didn't work like it was supposed to. The mouse fared worse; it never worked. I charged it, I used fresh alkaline batteries, I pushed the little red button on the bottom. Nothing.
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