Targus USB Ultra Mini Keyboard Keypad (PAUK10U)

Nowhere does Targus promise that this keypad will be Mac-compatible, but I decided to take a chance. Keyboards seem pretty universal these days. No special drivers required or anything, right? Not in this case.

This Targus keypad is a quality product as long as you use it within Windows. It's small and light with just the right amount of cable - not too short and not too long. It acts as a two-port USB hub to boot, which is nice. Don't expect USB 2.0 speeds out of them, though. They're USB 1.1. I think for USB 2.0 they'd need to be plugged into the wall for power.

Anyway, the device does indeed function plug-and-play for the most part. In Windows there are no issues I found. But on OSX I found that within some applications the keypad did not behave as expected. In simple text editors, for example, it would type numbers just fine. But in games where the number keys function as hotkeys, sometimes I got no input, or mysterious input. I wasn't always able to tell what key presses it was sending the computer. Weird stuff would happen.

As soon as you plug the device into OSX, you know you've got trouble. Your Mac will ask you what kind of keyboard it is, and it offers two choices. I don't recall the specifics, but it's something like "excuse me, but did you just plug in a 102-key or a 110-key keyboard?" Of course it's neither and I tried faking it with both settings. Neither improved the situation. The Mac will also tell you to press the key to the right of the shift key in order to tell it what kind of keyboard it is. But uh... there isn't a shift key.

So I'm not taking any points away from Targus because the keypad does what it promises: it works well with Windows. But I wanted to put this review out there so that anyone else with a Mac would know better. Thankfully, it wasn't that expensive a mistake.