Simple enough – Kinesis supply a tool for pulling keycaps off their mechanism (and you can buy them for a euro or two off a dozen places on the net), you pull all the keys, keeping track of what goes where (do one chunk at a time helps), then lots of compressed air and a dry paintbrush to clean out the gunk, and then put the keycaps back on. Takes less time to do it than to describe it, almost…

pulling all the keys, cleaning up the bowls, cleaning off the keys and replacing everything.

The speed increase is about 10% alright mark (at least it was for me) and you don’t lose your speed on the planks (as you find when you have to use laptops). As to the Optimus keyboards, they look magnificent, but I’d hate to have to clean the gunk out of one!

I got the foot pedal with my second kinesis Bob, but to tell the truth, I don’t tend to use it very much at all.

The two are remarkably similar, though there are minor differences. The Maltron was far more expensive when I went looking initially though, and to be honest, I’ve never had any problems with the Kinesis so I just stopped looking. There’s a Maltron-v-Kinesis (albiet by a Maltron user) here: http://www.tifaq.org/archive/kinesis-vs-maltron.txt

The palm pads get a bit funky too.

Okay, near perfect input tools: kinesis keyboard with foot pedals for mouse actions and the forehead tracking mouse pointer.