It's black, it's cool and Milady likes it...
Written: Apr 30 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Svelte looks, works well, lots of buttons and controls, Good tech support.
Cons: Build quality could be a little better.
Manual is almost non-existent
The Bottom Line: The most evil-looking keyboard/mouse combination out there. Lost of buttons and controls, and no trailing leads. Looks good, feels right... highly recommended.
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| murgan's Full Review: Logitech Cordless Freedom (970044-0403) Keyboard a... |
When I told Milady that I was thinking of getting a new keyboard and mouse she asked me what was wrong with the ones that we already had.
I had admired this keyboard/mouse combo from afar for many moons now, but the $100 price-tag gave me pause for thought. It took a $20 instant rebate, along with a gift certificate I received last Christmas, to make me finally bite the bullet.
When I got home and opened the box, I found the following:
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A keyboard. Big, flat, and evil-looking. Decked out in black with titanium-grey highlights and festooned with buttons, it looked like it might have belonged to Darth Vader.
A slate-grey palm rest that attached to the keyboard. This item looks like it was developed for a different product and makes the ensemble look cheap. I didn't use it
A mouse. Similarly dressed but not quite matching. They could have used a little more black in its construction.
A CD containing drivers and other software.
A small black "gadget" whose purpose was not immediately recognizable.
A CD-sized fold-out piece of paper that laughingly called itself a manual.
Another piece of paper whose job it was to push Logitech's products while offering a 10% rebate that expired at the end of last year. Hmmm...
No less than six AA alkaline batteries.
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The aforementioned "gadget" was the wireless transmitter. This doohickey plugged into the keyboard and mouse PS/2 ports of the computer or into a single USB port. I hastily unplugged and my old keyboard and mouse and plugged the the transmitter in. Next, I opened up the battery compartments on the keyboard and mouse.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that to both used the same battery size - AA - which was a good thing because I had quite a lot of rechargeable batteries in that size lying around looking for a good home, so i loaded them up (four in the keyboard, two in the mouse). Logitech recommend against using rechargeables, but I found that they worked just fine. I then fired up my computer. Unlike many who have reviewed this particular combo, I found that the whole lot was now working without any trouble at all without any need to press the "connect" buttons found on keyboard, mouse and transmitter.
The next part was the installation of the software on the CD. On sliding the CD into a drive I found the following delights clamoring for installation:
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iTouch 1.83 software - this is the program that allows the programmable buttons on the keyboard to work. The basic mouse and keyboard functions seem to work just fine without it.
iTouch desktop messenger - this is apparently supposed to check for new versions of the iTouch software. After confirming that the version on Logitech's web site was the same as the one on my CD, I decided that this was not worth installing, as I don't like programs that automagically talk to other machines on the Internet as a matter of personal taste.
Logitech Mouseware - from newsgroup posts I knew that this program was known to occasionally cause some problems. Since all of the mouse buttons seemed to be working perfectly, I invoked the "if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it" principle and decided not to install it.
RealJukebox - not being enamoured with anything from RealNetworks I passed on this one.
AOL software - what has this got to do with anything? No thank you...
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So to the big question... what's it like?
The mouse is very light... until you put the batteries in, when it has a weight that is best categorized as "meaty" without being excessive. It looks quite "funky", for lack of a better word, though it is definitely not for lefties. It feels somewhat uncomfortable, but that is probably because my hand is still getting used to it. Wireless AND optical... nice!
The keyboard feels... right. Not clicky, not dead-flesh, just... right. The buttons are an absolute boon, and the media controls are, for me, the coolest feature.
The Media controls consist of buttons for play/pause, Next Track, Previous Track and Stop, along with - wonder of wonders - a jog/shuttle style volume control. Finally there is the Media Button, which pops up a menu of installed multimedia applications that the media controls can work with (see below).
The customary Caps Lock/Shift Lock/Scroll Lock are absent from the keyboard, probably as they would cause a drain on the batteries if the LEDs were left on all the time. Instead, the iTouch software shows icons for each of these as an icon in the windows taskbar. This adds up to four icons to your taskbar - one for iTouch, and one for each of the three locks. Personally I would just as soon the lights were on the keyboard in the usual manner and "went to sleep" after a period of inactivity with one light blinking slowly or smething like that. Failing that, I would have preferred that they integrated all indicators into one taskbar icon instead of four (iTouch, Caps, Shift and Scroll).
The mouse is a revelation, though the right mouse button is not quite where my fingers expect it to be. I am sure that I will get used to it. Resolution is excellent.
Technical Stuff:
1) The MEDIA button brings up a pop-up list of Applications that the media controls can be configured to work with. For some reason on my machine WINAMP was not on that list, and a small registry hack was necessary to get the controls working with WINAMP. Kudos to Logitech Technical support who got the info to me within 24 hours.
2) If you have multiple user profiles under Windows 98, you will have to set up the buttons separately under each profile. However, there is a easier way solution. Set them up once and then export the registry settings for HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Logitech\iTouch. This works brilliantly.
I have now been using the combo for three weeks. Once used to it I could not live with anything less. All who have beheld it think that it is really cool. I will probably get one for my work machine as well. My wife, by the way, loves it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 80
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Epinions.com ID:
murgan
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Member: Stephen Murgan
Location: Louisville, KY, USA
Reviews written: 33
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
Fortysomething Computer Consultant, Born and raised in London, England, now living in Kentucky.
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