XGene Multimedia Mini Keyboard
Now that I’ve got hibernation working again on my machine, I’ve turned my thoughts to making it more comfortable.
I’ve longed for a decent small keyboard for many spins round the sun now. It seems like a simple thing. Make a keyboard with no number pad with a bunch of keys on it suitable for a Windows computer. Simple! It should be wired with a USB connector because I don’t want to fiddle with batteries or yet another USB wireless dongle. The keys should be decent with good tactile feedback. They should also be full-sized. It should do these things and take up as little space on my desk as possible.
Enter the XGene Multimedia Mini Keyboard. Take a moment to have a look at it.
That’s it. Sitting above my Apple Wireless keyboard. You’ll note that I have different requirements for my PC keyboard compared to my Mac’s, otherwise, I’d just use one of those. So far, keyfeel is pretty solid. It requires a bit of force to type on this thing. I’ve had a couple of keys not register because I wasn’t typing hard enough. The keys themselves get a little tiny when you get out to the edges of the board. The outside right edge is bordered by home/page-up/down/end which means that they’ve shrunk the backspace, backslash and enter keys to accommodate. The same goes for the keys on the left, the tab, caps lock (now a control key) and escape keys are pretty smallish.
Backspace is probably the worst of the bunch because it’s surrounded by a home key, the equal sign, and the decades old and mysterious PrtSc, Scroll Lock and Pause Break keys. Trying to erase a mistake often leads to more mistakes and funny beeps. The backspace key should probably cover the whole top right of the keyboard the way I type.
It doesn’t get much better at the bottom of the keyboard. The space bar is small and shifted just far enough to the left that I often hit the tiny little “alt” key next to it, popping open a menu. Windows key, Context menu key, Ins and Del live next to it, all competing with the arrow keys. Yes, it is a little cramped.
We’ll see how it works for gaming though. The main keys are normal-sized so I’m hoping they won’t hinder my use of the ASDW keys. I’m already considering prying up some of the worst offenders around the edges.
Preliminary review: 3 stars.
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