u/nabooengineer

This was order #2676 which included the Studio Bundle with accessories.

I love my Gen 3 Smart Typewriter. However, because I travel by motorcycle, it is not especially practical to take along. I recently bought a used Alpha. I feel that I would really like the Alpha if it had more traditional keycaps. My guess is that Astrohaus doesn’t put the more traditional keycaps on the Alpha due to audience segmentation sales against the Traveler or even the Smart Typewriter.

Let the Testing Begin.

I replaced the square original keycaps with these Generic PBT Double Shot Low Profile keycaps from Amazon. At the time of writing, these cost $19.99. Over the past year they have varied in price from $16 to $20 based on Amazon’s price history.

After some testing, I finally settled on this current configuration for the Alpha till additional keycaps sets arrive to test.

Initial Thoughts

I feel this keycap change improves my touch typing by at least 50%. Specifically my finger pads feel more comfortable and accurate on these keycaps and configuration than on the factory square style.

I kept the special OEM keycaps since the generic replacement keycaps did not fit these positions at all, however these are very close to the same height of 5mm, and the mix doen’t really seem to matter as much to my typing accuracy.

For appearance I might change the Caps lock key back to factory square depending on how much my OCD kicks in after some more mileage.

This generic low profile keycap set had 118 keycaps and in the listing state they are sold by Chosfox-Fans, shipped by Amazon. They are slightly cream white colored versus the factory bright white shading.

Having said that, I would like some keycaps that are closer to the factory bright white shading, but these feel much better than the squares IMHO.

I will run these for a few weeks, then will change them out for either Wormier or XVX low profiles. If anyone is interested, I will post my new test findings here.