Maltron Keyboards : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1997-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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Maltron

A maker of particularly durable, expensive, ergonomic keyboards. They have developed their own layout that gives the most dextrous fingers proportionately more work. that is easier than QWERTY on the wrist muscles, and gives about faster speed to good typists, considerably better for the less dexterous.

The Maltron Keyboard	Limited Edition
The Malt Layout	Finger Loading
The QWERTY Variant	Sources
Trackball	Links

The Maltron Keyboard

The Malt Layout

Maltron makes 3D ergonomic keyboards with dish shaped keyboards similar to the Kinesis. It would be fairer to say the opposite, since the Maltron was developed first. They have semi-conventional QWERTY layouts, DSK layouts and also their own Malt layout that looks like this:

Maltron keyboard layout

The QWERTY Variant

The QWERTY layout looks like this:

Maltron keyboard QWERTY layout

You hit the E key with your thumb. Your thumb has much more to do than with most other keyboards. Malt claims 30% speed improvement over QWERTY with their Malt Layout.

Trackball

The F type above has a built-in track ball.

Limited Edition

They have come out with a limited edition 550.00 GBP 2D Excecutive version that looks like this:

maltron 2D

with a layout like this:

maltron 2D layout

Why yet another layout? Mainly to give the left thumb something useful to do. The Maltron balances the workload between the left and right hands better than does the Dvorak layout. It has adjacent English digraphs that fingers flow over effortlessly.

Finger Loading

fingerloading

Sources

You can buy them from Applied Learning for $495.00 USD or for $620.00 USD for the trackball model. Last revised: 2007-06-26.

You can also buy them from any of this list of distributors.

In email conversations with the keyboard’s co-inventor Stephen Hobday, I learned that the low volumes mean the keyboards are manufactured individually by hand. This explains the high price. Hobday would like the capital to invest in a low cost injection moulded version.

The above diagrams and images came from the Maltron website and in emails from Stephen Hobday.

DSK
ergonomics
keyboard
posture

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