As you can see there are extra media keys along the top of the board, which unfortunately don't work with Winamp.

One nice touch is the inclusion of a USB hub on the back of the keyboard. This can be useful for plugging in a mouse or flash drive.

The feel of the keyboard is quite nice. It needs quite a firm touch but feels positive and definitely better than a cheap £10 solution. The standard QWERTY board has a split space bar so it can fold up into three sections. Although this doesn't look very good, it surprisingly doesn't get annoying at all.

The gaming board however is a slightly different story with the non-standard keys feeling quite tappy. Designed with FPS games in mind, we tested with UT2003, CS:S and Doom 3. The keys are well laid out and are surprisingly useful. Keys such as reload, use and weapons are at easy reach. Although the layout isn't considerably different from a standard WASD approach, the remoulding definitely helps.

To make typing possible, the QWERTY area is placed over the top of the insert, home and number pad areas. Because of this, there is a huge gap in the middle which makes typing very difficult. After a little time, you can get used to this, but we wouldn't recommend it for long stints of typing.

A couple of odd things were noticed. The software would crash if the keyset was changed while loading a game. Updated drivers may fix this. Also when the gaming board is installed, if you have left the num lock on the LED shines randomly through the board as it doesn't have a specific hole like the QWERTY keyboard has.

Final Thoughts

Overall the keyboard is a good solution. As with anything strange (think Microsoft Natural Keyboard), it takes a little getting used to. If you are new to games, you may find it easier to use as you won't have to re-learn to play.

As well as the standard gaming sets, there are keysets designed for specific games such as Doom 3. Quite abstractly, there are also keysets available for applications such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver. This opens up the market to IT professionals.

At around £40 this keyboard isn't cheap, but it's around the same price you would pay for a good quality Logitech or Microsoft keyboard. With both keysets and expansion in the future, we think this is money well spent.

<< Back | 1 | | 2 | Next >>