It's not nearly as functional as the full-size folding keyboards -- useful extra keys like "New" and "OK" aren't there, but that's to be expected with a keyboard this size. More perplexing, however, is the absence of parenthesis keys. You do have to reach for the stylus and the Palm's own buttons from time to time, and you must resist the temptation to use the ThumbPad's directional keys in the Apps menu -- they don't page up and down.

The fact that the ThumbPad flares outward from the Palm's base gives the keyboard more room and allows the keys to be bigger than the keys that PDAs with built-in thumbboards have. Key action is very nice, as nice as the Tungsten W or C (but with more room) and far nicer than Sony Clie thumbboards. I find typing surprisingly quick. I would have preferred to see sticky Shift, Fn and Control keys, like some built-in thumbboards, since holding down two keys at once is awkward on a keyboard of this type.

Overall I'm quite pleased with this little thumbboard, and look forward to using it to send SMS when my Palm Bluetooth card arrives.

This review was drafted on a Palm m505 using the ThumbPad.

The keyboard layout has a pretty big flaw. There's only one shift key, at the lefthand side. Would including a shift key on the right side as well have increased the size of the unit by that much? Punctuation is accessed using the "function" key, and, you guessed it, there's only one, on the lefthand side, right next to the quotation mark and apostrophe, making it very awkward to type these symbols. If there were shift and function keys on each side, you wouldn't have to shift your grip on the ThumbPad and it would be much more comfortable.

My biggest frustration with the ThumbPad is a non-fatal but annoying bug. If the ThumbPad is idle too long (on the order of ten seconds), the PDA stops accepting input from the keypad. I have to turn off the PDA, and turn it back on by pressing a key on the ThumbPad, and then I can continue typing normally. My email to tech support has not yet been returned (though it's only been a few days). I had a similar small bug with a different Targus keyboard in the past, which was never resolved, so I think I'll be avoiding their products in the future (when possible--the Visor user doesn't have a LOT of options for peripherals!)