High Quality Keyboard at a Low Price!
Written: Oct 29 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Configurable extra keys, good workmanship.
Cons: Taller than it should be.
The Bottom Line: This won’t fit on everyone’s desk, but if you need a new keyboard you can’t beat it for the price.
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| grimjack2's Full Review: Logitech Internet (967057-0403) Keyboard |
This is probably the best valued keyboard I’ve found to date. At only approximately $25, this is a high quality keyboard, with a handful of extra buttons.
As a fast typist, I can really notice the difference between a well designed keyboard and a poor one. This has a good layout, well placed buttons, and a great feel to it. The keys are a little mushier than I like, but this helps make it very silent.
Unlike the equivalents from Microsoft, this keyboard allows you to give it a lower tilt, or even no tilt at all. Not everybody likes their keyboards flat on the table, but I do.
The first thing you notice with a keyboard like this is all the extra keys along the top edge of the keyboard. There are nine of them, and they are fairly small. Their small size isn’t a problem, although it does look like there is a lot of wasted room up there. Actually there is, since it is curved outwards at the top, making this about an inch taller than it needs to be. Most people won’t notice, but at home it sits about a half inch over the front edge of my shallow desk.
These keys do various interesting things. There is a Shut down and a restart button. Nice to have them handy on the keyboard, but I don’t mind making it a little more difficult to choose these than with a one step button. Most of the other buttons can be programmed to do whatever you would like, but they have labels underneath them saying things like Media Player, Word Processor, Email, and etc.. I wished there was a little template for the area around the buttons so that they could be treated as fully programmable keys.
Not all the buttons are fully configurable. The Media Player button only lists players installed on the computer. I found this strange that it couldn’t be completely open ended like the other keys.
And of course the volume and mute buttons can only serve those function. After installing the software, the volume and mute buttons have a very nice visual effect. When you increase or decrease the volume you see a temporary green bar of vertical lines along the bottom of the screen, which looks identical to the traditional Sony TV volume bar. People I showed it to couldn’t believe that it wasn’t something built into the monitor. When you mute, you see the word mute in the bottom right of the screen. Not necessary, but a cool feature none the less. In an office environment, being able to instantly mute is very handy.
The next thing you’ll notice is the scroll wheel. It is basically the equivalent of the scroll wheel on your mouse, and there are two buttons above it which emulate the right and left click mouse buttons. It is a little odd being on the left side of the keyboard, instead of the right where most people have the mouse, but for most people it will take only minutes to get accustomed to it.
In order to make use of these special buttons and features, you have to first install the Itouch software. The software could be better, but I’m not exactly sure how. If you don’t install the software, the keyboard still functions great as just a standard keyboard. Some people don’t like little programs running all the time in the background waiting for the user to press the volume key or something, so if all you want is a traditional keyboard, the software isn’t required.
There are great labels under many keys showing copy/cut/paste, undo, Select All, and etc. These are probably extremely common knowledge to most people, but I gave it to a computer illiterate and I know it helped remind him of what these shortcuts do. It certainly doesn’t hurt to have them. The Microsoft keyboard only has four labeled Bold, Underline, Italics and Undo.
Do I have any complaints with the keyboard? Well, no big ones. I wish it were black for one, but that is just a matter of preference. I do wish it were smaller than it is. It is almost 2” taller than it needs to be considering all the extra room it has for it’s small row of extra buttons. At least this keyboard’s palm rest is optional, unlike the Microsoft keyboard. If I were to use the palm rest, the keyboard becomes very large, too large to fit on my desk at home or the office!
If you need a new keyboard, I cannot recommend this one enough for the price. I’d only suggest paying the other $40 for the Microsoft Office keyboard if you are a hardcore Office user, and can use the even more special extra buttons that it has.
The Logitech keyboard extras are excellent for beginners as well as the computer illiterate. They are merely nice for experienced people, but really with no drawbacks. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen some real thought go into keyboard design, so I’m glad quality products like this one are available again!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 40
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Epinions.com ID:
grimjack2
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Location: San Rafael, CA, Marin County
Reviews written: 181
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About Me:
Film is my favorite art form. I live a life of constant amelioration.
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