I'm trying to understand how these work. From what I understand so far the Trezor or KeepKey contain a "private key" that's used to sign a transaction.
I watched a couple of videos but most just show how the devices operate and don't give a high level view of what each actually does.
Can someone explain to me how this works in a few more words. Does the Trezor or KeepKey generate a wallet address for example. Also I understand if I lose either then I can restore if I know a set of words. But how does that actually work?
Here is a link to the Trezor User Manual. You should read it carefully.
It sounds like the OP has done this already, thanks for turning him away.
Those hardware wallets still require a wallet on a connected computer in order to function. They can interface with certain wallets, you will need to check their websites to find out which ones. Those wallets create the transaction and then sends it to the hardware wallet for you to authorize it to sign the transaction. Then the transaction is sent back to your computer and broadcast through your computer.
The hardware wallets generate the addresses. The addresses are generated deterministically from a seed, meaning that the same algorithm is always used and when using the same seed, the same set of addresses are produced. The recovery words are just a representation of that seed.
This sounds like sound advice.
To the OP - once you've got it sorted a lot of us would love to hear your experiences with both, write a review or something.