Microsoft Keyboard with Fingerprint Reader
One of my keyboards started to get a little flaky, so I needed a new one. I remembered a post on Scott Dockendorf's blog about Microsoft's Thumbprint Reader Technology, and I found a good price at Amazon, so I decided to go for it.
The keyboard itself is decent, but nothing spectacular. It has specialized buttons clearly aimed at the home user -- "My Documents", "My Pictures", "Messenger", stuff like that. Things I won't use. They can be reprogrammed to launch any app, but still I'm not sure I see the need. The wireless mouse that comes with it is interesting, with a multi-way mouse wheel. I won't use that, because I love my Optical Trackball (thumb operated). The fingerprint reader, however, combined with the software from Digital Persona is very cool.
When you visit a website or windows application with a login form (technically, any form that you fill out the same way each time [correction: this turns out not to be the case - if it doesn't look like a login form, the software will not fill it in]) for the first time, you put your finger on the reader. After authenticating you (which is surprisingly fast), the Digital Persona software asks how to answer the questions on the form -- with the ones that are obviously about your identity displayed prominently. After you tell it how to fill out the form, you are able to put any registered finger on the reader again to have it fill out the form for you. (It does not work on Java apps, and probably won't work on Flash apps. Anything that's not using a native Windows control is probably not going to work.)
I had no idea how many times I typed a username and password during the day until I started using this thing. I liked it so much, I bought a 2nd one for the other machine on my desk. In retrospect, since that keyboard still works, I probably should have gotten the stand-alone fingerprint reader. That gets you the benefits of the reader and DP software, without the expense of the whole keyboard.