Kinesis Freestyle2 Ergonomic Keyboard + Numeric Keypad Review
Even though I’ve had the opportunity to try many different ergonomic keyboards (including some of the most advanced models available), my enduring daily driver for the past 15 years has stayed the The Kinesis Freestyle + V3 lifter kit. I’ve tried and reviewed many other keyboards, but none have checked the boxes for me like this simple, longstanding favorite.
What’s so great about the Kinesis Freestyle? Whatever you want it to be.
Once upon a time, Kinesis offered a keyboard called the Maxim; you can still buy one on eBay from time to time if you’re curious to see what it was like. The Kinesis Maxim came with one large base and two keyboard modules permanently attached. You could rotate and tilt them to some degree, but that was about it, and the modules weren’t leaving the keyboard.
With Freestyle, which came out in the early 2000’s, and then with Freestyle2 in the 2010’s, Kinesis hit on a design that would be hard to improve, because so many “improvements” are already baked into the cake.
V3 = Basic tilt
Easily installed to the base of the keyboard using small included screws, the V3 lifters push up the center of your Freestyle in a “tent” shape, which (as ergonomic people have told us since the 1990’s) angles your wrists more advantageously toward the “handshake” position. With the V3 you get three tilt levels – 5, 15, and 20 degrees. Having tried all of them, I prefer the lowest one. This is mostly because of how it integrates with my desk setup, nicely matching the height of my Contour ArmSupport Red.
VIP3 = Tilt + palm rests
If you take everything we said above about the V3 lifters kit from Kinesis and a couple of attached palm supports with stick-on pads, you have the VIP3 kit. While the functionality of this configuration is great, and many users will appreciate the wrist support, I’ve never been able to get into the feel of the palm rests, which just seem scratchy me. I’m sure Kinesis has thousands of users whose experience would say otherwise, so take this for what it’s worth, and try it for yourself if you think it will be a good fit.
Ascent = Go vertical
For fans of the SafeType style keyboard – who want to go beyond the angled “handshake” position and all the way to playing an imaginary accordion – there’s the Kinesis Ascent kit. Costing more than the Freestyle2 itself, the Ascent gives you eight tent levels, starting where the V3/VIP3 leave off at 20 degrees, and going up all the way to 90 degrees as shown below.
Extended cable available
For people with mile-wide shoulders, or those who want to do something wildly unconventional (such as affixing the separate keyboard modules to the arms of a chair), Kinesis offers a cable to separate the modules by about 20″ instead of the default 9″. This cable is pretty easy to install, as long as you’re comfortable opening up your Freestyle with a small screwdriver. I did it on my previous Freestyle (a keyboard that lives on, though in someone else’s office), but found later that the default separation is plenty for someone with my particular needs.
My personal experience
When I first experimented with the Freestyle about fifteen years ago, I thought I’d want the VIP3 kit for the palm rests. At the time, I was very into palm rests – but later, I figured out that pressing something into my palm or wrist all the time while using my computer didn’t help me out much, and actually made certain pain symptoms much worse. Even if this hadn’t been the case, the stick-on palm rests that come with the VIP3 kit were kind of scratchy on my sensitive skin. They may, of course, have been improved in the last decade-and-a-half, so your mileage may vary.
Although I personally use the V3 – tilt but not palm rests – and have done for a long time, I would caution anyone against configuring this way without some good support for your elbows and/or arms. This keyboard setup pairs nicely with my RollerMouse Red + ArmSupport Red, but anything at least equivalent to the support of arm rests would be helpful if not essential. You simply don’t want your elbows hanging out in the space. Your shoulders will hate you, and in my case, the tension would go all the way down into my fingers.
Fifteen years in, here’s what I would change
Back when my job involved more development/coding (those were the bad old days!), I had reason to worry a lot about the little extra function keys that most ordinary users probably ignore. The Freestyle doesn’t go crazy with these by any means, but there is a nice bank of them on the left side of the keyboard. I used to use a few of them, and even did some fancy key remapping to make myself an Alt-Tab combination that was less effort to press. (If you’re curious, I remapped Web to Alt, putting an Alt key directly next door to Tab.)