 This is a cherish order, I mean the care recorder. It is a keyboard which lets you type at the speed of thought. At least that's what they claim. But is that realistic? Is it worth the $250 I spent on it? Let's walk through my month-long journey of learning the care recorder. But first, a bit about me. I'm a programmer and I type about 115 words per minute on this quarter keyboard. I use VIM so I'm a heavy keyboard user, both typing speed and accuracy are essential to my work. The care recorder works using these little nubs. Each finger of your hand naturally rests on the silver nubs. There are also black nubs within easy reach. Each nub can go north, south, west, or east. And each direction is an input just like on a normal keyboard. The care recorder is shipped with a reference card which shows the key mappings for each nub. On the right index finger, for example, west inputs A, south inputs T, east inputs space, and north inputs enter. Let's fast forward to the third day of our journey. It's day three right now. The first three days I spent learning all the alphabet. I also learned some punctuation. So now I can make complete sentences. However, I can't capitalize the letters yet. I'm learning patterns like T-H-E and N-G that you type along in English. And I noticed that it just comes out automatically. I don't even think about the individual presses. It just flows naturally. Now, sometimes I hesitate, often I hesitate. Currently, I'm about 15 words a minute. Here's a little typing demonstration. I've been typing about two hours per day with 30 minute breaks in between each session. So it's about four hours total of typing time. And when I take a break, I am watching a YouTube video or something where I don't use my hands. So far, I'm pretty happy with my progress for the first three days. Normally I take notes in Vim and I'm taking notes for this video in Vim. And I notice I can use the arrow key knob thingy to navigate instead of using H-A-K-L. That's probably what I'll be using. I've noticed that the keyboard is really quiet compared to a normal dome switch or mechanical keyboard. A lot of that's probably due to the low travel time. My fingers are barely moving. That means I'm not applying a lot of force to push every key, which results in a lot less noise. Yesterday I had a lot of pain. Every time I typed, it hurt a little bit. Felt like I was using muscles that I hadn't used before, particularly in the ring finger, but just generally, like all my fingers hurt a little bit. But today, the third day, I have felt no pain. So it seems like it was just a temporary thing. So it's been a week and I've learned enough so I can use monkey type to compare my current typing speed to my typing speed on my old Querta keyboard. So far it looks pretty bad, but I think I am improving. I feel like I'm learning patterns better. I started rolling key presses so that I can press T and then space, for example. E on space are all on the left index finger. If you were going to type a word like there, you might type TH and then E and then roll your finger over to R and roll it back to E and then roll it over to space. And it feels really nice typing like that. It's kind of like on a Querta keyboard where you can kind of press three keys with a fancy finger work, but this keyboard, there's a lot more opportunities than with Querta. So it makes typing really fun when you get those words. And it's also really, really fast. I also started using the left space after I input the letter E so I could roll from the E to a space rather than always using the right space. So far it looks like my typing speed is between 20 and 25 words per minute, depending on the complexity of the text. I'm still at the point where typing is frustrating. My thoughts are much, much faster than how fast I'm typing. So I'm often thinking several words ahead and then it screws me up. I've been averaging one to two hours per day of deliberate practice. And then I've been using this keyboard for normal typing outside of practice, though generally I try to avoid typing because it's just so slow. One thing that frustrated me about the first week is that I often pause because I was just totally stuck on where a letter was, like where's the letter G, where's the letter H. But now the only time I get stuck like that is when I'm typing capital letters. I'm holding shift. That's because normally for a QWERTY keyboard I always use the right shift. With this keyboard I'm trying to balance it. So if I'm pressing a key on the left hand, I'll hold the right shift. If I press a key on the right hand, I'll hold left shift. Just so one hand isn't doing a lot of the work. And I often get confused about which hand to use. And that gives me pause. But aside from that, I'm able to enter each character pretty quickly. I'm not on track for my goal of 100 words per minute by the end of 30 days. However, I have not tried courted entry yet. The Launchpad app seems to recommend courting at around 40 words per minute. I'm not quite at 40 words per minute yet, so I haven't taken on courting. As I type faster, I notice sometimes I accidentally press a key twice. I've been using the carry quarter for over a month. Let's talk about what I like and I don't like about it. I like that my hands and fingers don't move too much. This is pretty unique to the carry quarter. On other keyboards, your fingers are reaching for other keys, especially for the symbol keys, which I use often in programming. But with the carry quarter, because your fingers rest on the nubs and stay there, your fingers barely move when you type. However, when I'm typing chords, especially chords that involve four fingers, I do jerk a lot. I think that's a matter of practice, but I'm not perfectly still when typing the complicated chords. Another thing I like is a seamless transition between character entry and courting. If you want to type a character, you just press the nub. If you want to chord something, you press two nubs or three or four, depending on the chord. There's no character entry mode that you have to switch to and then switch back to courting mode. It's all seamless. There's also the carry quarter light, which is a product I did not review, which is like a courty keyboard, except it has this feature where you can do chords. I like that the carry quarter is a split keyboard. Because it's split and compact, I'm able to fit an Apple track pad in the middle, making it feel kind of like a MacBook Pro. However, if you use the carry quarter as a split keyboard, the feet are less grippy than when they have the middle bracket in between. My whole carry quarter setup is compact. Even with the Apple track pad in the middle, it's smaller than my tenkey list courty keyboard. The carry quarter has an up for arrow keys. This gives you easy access to down, up, left and right. As I mentioned in day three, this makes them easier to use. I really like courting. It's a lot of fun. I get really excited when I'm able to chord four or five words in a row. It's really satisfying and very smooth. However, I'm often slower at typing chords, but I think that's just a matter of practice. I've only been using chords in the last week. You know what else is fun? Rolling keys. I mentioned on day eight that I roll when I'm typing the word there. I can roll the word at faster than I can chord it. But for words like there, I learned the chord and that's much faster to type. So overall, I'm rolling less often thanks to chords. Honestly, rolling feels more natural to me than courting. I still really enjoy rolling when I can. Another thing I like is a generative text menu or GTM. If you press both alt keys at the same time, you get a text menu where you can change settings like courting sensitivity. You don't need any extra software. You can just open notepad or text edit, press both alt keys and the carry quarter will type for you. The most important feature of the GTM is adding chords without using the chord manager software. The chord manager has problems, which I'll discuss later, but adding chords with the GTM feels pretty solid, though a bit unintuitive. I like that the carry quarter settings are stored on the device, not on your computer. This means if you use the GTM to add a chord, you can use that same chord on a different computer with no extra setup. I use this feature a lot when I'm switching between my different computers because I use Mac, Linux and Windows. After a month of using the carry quarter almost exclusively, I switched back to a credit keyboard. The transition was seamless. My typing speed with QWERTY did not change at all. So if you were scared that the carry quarter might screw up your QWERTY muscle memory, don't be. Seems like the carry quarter occupies a different part of the brain than the QWERTY keyboard so there's no muscle memory interference. Let's talk about some things I don't like about the carry quarter. Let's start with the software. When you get the keyboard, they point you in the direction of the carry quarter launch pad app. It's a teaching tool specifically designed for the carry quarter. The problem with launch pad is that it teaches you everything at once. If you want to learn the letters, it teaches you all the alphabet all at once. I tried learning this way but I ended up just following the diagrams rather than actually learning what the letters are. Launch pad was overwhelming. I needed to learn a few keys at a time otherwise nothing would stick. So instead of learning on launch pad, I learned through Typing Club's Dvorak course. Typing Club teaches you at two keys at a time which I think is a much more reasonable place. All keyboard teaching sites walk you through learning individual characters but there's no website other than launch pad for teaching about chords. The problem is that launch pad has you learn hundreds of chords at once which is ridiculous. You can't narrow it down to the most common 10 or 50 words. It shows you everything at once. There is their recursive learning algorithm which somewhat focuses on chords you struggle with but if you close the launch pad app and reload it all that learning disappears. So launch pad is worthless to me even if you use its unique courting features. I instead learned chords using monkey type gradually adding words to the word list as suggested by the wiki. Related to launch pad is the carequarter chord manager. The GTM I talked about earlier it lets you add chords one at a time but the chord manager lets you import and export chords, list chords which are already programmed in your carequarter and delete chords you don't like. The chord manager runs in your computer's web browser so the interface is easier to use than the GTM for beginners. The problem with the chord manager is that it's buggy. If you add a chord then tab away to test your chord. The chord manager often screws up and you have to restart the whole process of reconnecting to chord manager. Also the chord manager only works with certain browsers on some operating systems. I managed to get it working with Edge on Windows but I couldn't get it working in any browser on Linux and I couldn't get it working with Firefox and any of my computers. Now let's talk about customer support. For carequarter customer support is mostly done through Discord which is a chat app. Their Discord is really intimidating. There are hundreds of channels while not hundreds of channels but hundreds of places you can ask questions. I once asked a question and they told me go to another channel and they told me to go to another channel so it's not the best experience. It's hard to tell who's an employee who knows what they're talking about or just another community member who's trying their best to help out. Most questions seem to not be noticed by employees and questions are often asked multiple times but not put in an FAQ. But even if they did make an FAQ they'd probably put it in the Discord which would be very hard to search. There's a special Discord channel explaining how to report an issue. The problem is that it tells you a bunch of different things to do. In some cases you need to send an email. In other cases you need to talk in channel X or for this other thing try channel Y or maybe need to use this tag and chat or DM this person or maybe one of these other people or maybe need to fill out this Google form which requires a Google account. To summarize they make it difficult to report an issue. I hope they would do what most companies do. Have an email, maybe contact form on their website. You send them a message and they will do all the filtering and categorization for you and log a ticket in their ticker system. That seems like a much more mature way to do customer support than having a Discord server. I imagine they're relying on community support through Discord because they're overloaded with support requests. However, I don't think that leads to a good experience for customers. I had an issue where my caracoder was sometimes repeating keys. I posted an issue on one of the Discord channels and they told me to DM somebody from customer support. I sent off the DM and they asked for my firmware version. I let them know and they didn't get back to me for a few days. I had to poke them for them to respond. Eventually they said they would send me a replacement device at a warranty. So not the best customer experience but at least they didn't completely ignore me. All right, let's talk about issues with the caracoder itself starting with the least annoying issues first. I use a Kinect Pro KVM to switch between my computers. On a QWERTY keyboard, I can press SHIFT then SHIFT then 1 to switch to input number one or SHIFT then SHIFT then 2 to switch to input two, et cetera. This doesn't work with a caracoder. I need to press the physical buttons on the KVM in order to switch inputs. When you switch OSes, you quickly notice that the modifier keys are different spots. On Linux and Windows, you press the control key with your ring finger but on Mac OS you press the command key with your palm. The modifiers are customizable with the GTM. However, I switch OSes multiple times a day and I don't wanna be configuring the caracorder that often. So I just train my muscle memory to learn the different ways to copy and paste. This modifier problem does exist on QWERTY keyboards. However, on a QWERTY keyboard, the control and the command keys are right next to each other on the caracorder they're in totally different spots. Let's say you're typing a word then you need to type a number or a symbol. This happens a lot in programming. You type your word, then you reach for the numshift key. While you're thinking about which numdirection is the symbol you want, the keyboard is telling your computer you're typing a random letter over and over again. What seems to be happening is that while you're holding the numshift key, it behaves like you're still pressing the previous key. So if you wanna type parenthesis options, parenthesis, you might end up inputting parenthesis options with a lot of Ss, parenthesis. Another issue also with numshift. In order to type most symbols, you need to press both shift and numshift. If you need to type a symbol, then a capital letter, intuitively you release numshift, but keep shift held. Then you type your letter. But this doesn't work. The caracorder behaves as if you're not holding shift, so you get a lowercase letter instead. You have to release shift, then press shift again in order for it to register properly. Let's talk about some issues with courting. The way courting works is this. To chord the word thumb, you press T and E together. The computer first sees TE or ET, then the caracorder will backspace and type the full word the. If you mess up, the T and E stay on the screen, but you can try again and the caracorder will backspace all your failed attempts. This normally works well, but there are a few problems. Sometimes the caracorder backspace is too much. For example, if you type a left parenthesis, then chord a word, it'll backspace the left parenthesis. So it's hard to start a parenthetical expression with a chorded word like the or like. Another case of this is in Vim. In order to start typing in Vim, you need to start by pressing I, O, A or C command. For example, to change the word this to that, you might input C-W-T-H-A-T. Let's try this with chords. You type C-W, then chord T-H. The caracorder thinks that the C-W was a failed attempt at a chord and it'll helpfully backspace it. Of course, it's not actually helpful. The caracorder is deleting unrelated stuff in my file. So courting is kind of annoying in Vim. There's also the opposite issue where for other symbols, the caracorder doesn't backspace enough. So if you're trying to chord the word U, you press the Y and U keys at the same time. If you wanna capitalize it, you press Y, U and also shift. But when I press shift, one of my finger moves a little bit. So instead of a U, I sometimes press a single quote or a double quote because I'm pressing shift. When I finally input the chord correctly, it doesn't backspace the quote. I need to backspace it manually. All right, now let's talk about the deal breakers which made me switch back to courty and why I do not recommend the caracorder. Let's start with a key repeat issue I brought up in my status updates in which I talked to customer support about. What happens is that sometimes when you press a key, it actually inputs two or three times rather than just once. This happens with any key, not just keys on one nub or two nubs. I first noticed this issue after two weeks and I talked about it in my two and a half week update. Here's a demonstration of the issue happening over and over again while I try to practice typing. There's another repeat, but it just happened again. Double the five, double the R, double the F. Oh, a doubling happens. Make it doubled again. Number one, E, E got doubled. Though that's interesting. It got doubled to a lower case. What happened again? As I mentioned earlier, I talked to caracorder support and they sent me replacement. However, the replacement had the same issue. The next deal breaker for me is that the caracoder does not allow you to remap keys. The caracorder website claims that you have limitless customization, but this clearly is not true. You can technically remap keys using your operating system, but that doesn't work for what I need. So when you hold down the numshift key, the left and right halves of the keyboard are symmetrical. When you type the number five on the left side, the computer sees five. When you type the number five on the right side, the computer also sees five. This means I can't map keys differently on the left side than I can on the right side. What I want it to do is when I press numshift five on the left side, it inputs five. But when I press numshift five on the right side, it inputs percent sign. But you can't do customization like this on the caracoder even with operating system support. Why do I care about remapping the numshift layer? Because typing symbols is a pain. I have to use my pinkies, which is stressful. It strains my hands to hold both pinkies at the same time. And as a programmer, I type symbols a lot. On a quarter keyboard, if I want to type the percent sign, I hold shift and then reach over and press five. It's the same on the caracoder. You hold shift and press five. But on the caracoder, five is actually numshift O. So you're really pressing shift numshift O to input the percent sign and shift and numshift are both on pinkies. This is particularly annoying for keys like plus where you have to use both your pinkies for the shift and numshift and use your ring finger to type the plus. And I just don't have the dexterity for that. So I want to remap the shift numshift layer onto the right side of the numshift layer. So that means that one side of the numshift layer is the numbers and the other side is the symbols. That way I have access to all the symbols I want using one pinkie rather than two pinkies. Another reason I want to remap keys is that the palm nubs are very hard to press. I often need to press slash and escape and hyphen. And these are annoying to type on the caracoder because they're palm inputs. My palms are very imprecise. Often when I hit slash, I accidentally hit hyphen and that screws things up in Vim. And sometimes when I hit escape, I'll also hit Q, which is on one of the thumb nubs. So you know I'll fat finger and hit two nubs at the same time because I'm moving my palm, which is also moving my thumb. The palm nubs also physically hurt my hands because they seem to be more stiff than the other nubs. It'd be much nicer if I could remap escape hyphen and such to another nub rather than using the palm nubs. Like for the mouse nub, which is easy to access but I never use. But the firmware doesn't let you do any real customization for what the nubs do. Also some keys like print screen and insert are completely missing from the caracorder. You can use software to remap a different key to print screen or a different key to insert if you want. But that means you can't use that other key. So I would like to remap some unused key like the mouse nubs to print screen so I don't have to attach a separate keyboard just to type print screen. Those deal breakers wouldn't be a problem if the firmware was open source. I've wanted to fix some of the bugs I've encountered with the caracorder or change the remapings myself. I'm a programmer after all, I can dig into the code. But the firmware is closed so I can't. The caracorder team held an AMA and I asked about making the source code available for the firmware. They said no, it's gonna be a proprietary product. I guess with the mercy of the caracorder company to fix these bugs, there's no reasonable way for the community to fix them. So there you have it, my review of the caracorder. To sum it up, I do not recommend this keyboard at 2022 but it does look promising. Maybe in a year or two they'll fix the issues and then I'll be willing to look at the product again. Be sure to save your caracorder in a dry, safe location.