251 words on Hardware
When rejoicing about my newly acquired iMate recently and starting to salivate about the German Extended II keyboard I was going to attach to it, I was warned about it just not working perfectly with the iMate. And, obviously, such warnings are never wrong: The iMate simply refuses to map one of the keyboard’s keys (either the <> key or the ^° key, depending on how you set things up).
And as far as I can tell, the unmapped key just remains dead. Pressing it won’t do anything. Thanks a lot. My suspicious is that this is due to the iMate being a good old American product and as we all know (well Americans seem to be mostly unaware of that fact) American keyboards usually come with one key less than all others. It’s unclear to my why that is the case as generally the US pride themselves quite successfully in having a bigger choice and huger sizes of everything. But as far as keyboards go there is a key missing (to the right of the left shift key, usually).
And while Apple themselves have been handling these differences rather well for as long as I can remember, it appears that in conjunction with the iMate things manage to go wrong after all and one of the keys remains stubbornly dead. Luckily I don’t type that many circumflexed characters or tempereatures that this would be a really bad problem but it does ruin the good first impression I got of the iMate.