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The Keyboard:::...
I'll be the first to admit I'm not a
massive fan of button-packed multimedia keyboards.
As rule. by the time I've located the correct button
and pressed it I could have done the same thing twice
with my mouse. My mother however swears by hers and
does almost everything with the keyboard function
buttons so it's quite possible I'm the exception rather
than the norm. That said, I have found myself using
them more on this keyboard than any other I've owned
so maybe the winds of change they are-a-blowing!
Out of the box this keyboard is a bit
of a strange beast. It looks and feels huge yet alongside
my trusty Microsoft Internet Keyboard it's not actually
as big as it seems.
One things for certain, this keyboard
oozes class. The black, gun metal grey and silver
colour scheme is very "in" right now and
if you have a black case too this is certainly the
pièce de résistance.
The buttons are frosted and semi-transparent
as you can probably see best from the picture above.
The symbols are printed on them in white though with
my desk light at some angles they can be quite difficult
to see. Kind of like white lines on a wet road when
the sun comes out. To allow for the added function
buttons the keys are also packed quite close together
which may take a short while to get used to, particularly
for typo-prone two-finger typists like myself.
Most of the main functions are laid
out along the top of the keyboard. Over on the very
right are the Calculator, Log Off and Sleep buttons.
The "F Lock" button works in the same way
as the Caps Lock or Num Lock buttons and is used to
toggle between the dual function sets available on
the top row of keys.
To the right of the main media control
buttons are three 'Net related function buttons and
three file access buttons. For some reason I never,
ever use the My Documents, My Pictures and My Music"
folders, prefering to set up slightly more specific
storage locations, but all is not lost. I changed
"My Documents" so it opened Dreamweaver,
I changed "My Pictures" so it opened Photoshop
and changed "My Music" so it opened my MP3
folder. Easy!
Taking the "Head of the Household"
central location are the media control buttons. As
you'd expect there's the ability to launch your media
player, play and pause your media, change its volume,
mute it and navigate through it. These buttons are
slightly larger than the others.
To the left of these are the innovative
"My Favourites" buttons as we discussed
on the previous page, and below these the "Show
Favourites" button which brings up the list of
what's been allocated to which location.
And just to put the glaze on the cherry
that's on the icing that's on the cake, a second tilt
wheel and a pair of Web page navigation buttons as
found on the mouse itself. If that seems kind of pointless
I thought so too, but that didn't stop me using it.
In fact in a lot of cases it seems far more natural
to scroll a page with this wheel than it does the
mouse wheel.
And if all that wasn't enough, how about
the added luxury of a padded leather-look wrist rest.
Yes, now you can own a keyboard that matches your
luxury executive leather swivel chair, or if your
like me, compensates for the fact you don't own a
luxury executive leather swivel chair.
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