Xerra
19 januari 2025
I was initially reluctant to splash out the £160 this keyboard costs but a friend swore blind by his and advised me to keep an eye out for a price reduction and then grab it then. It turns out this was a wise decision. Since purchasing this keyboard, i've followed up by purchasing the Logitech bluetooth mouse and speakers set as well. All three bits of equipment seem expensive compared to the cheap rubbish you can get, but here it turns out that paying that bit extra was more than worth it.It's the keyboard I'm reviewing here, though, so a brief bit of context. I'm a developer and do a bit of writing on the side as well, so tend to spend a lot of time using a keyboard. I also work IT from home, so I'm used to using various keyboards from old, wired HP ones, and the cheaper, flimsy plastic logitech ones that share adapters with their cheap mice. I've never really thought much about getting something multi-purpose that I could use among all my devices until recently, but I've been a Mac user for years, so once I'd decided it was worth pursuing, I needed to get something that would work well on both my Mac mini and the work laptop. Since purchasing this device, i've also picked up a windows gaming laptop, so it became even more important.The first thing I considered is how the keyboard feels when typing. Even though this keyboard does have a numeric pad, the whole unit did feel like it was a bit smaller in width than the keyboards I'm normally used to, so it took a little adjustment before that became comfortable. I also had a small niggle with the space bar causing a rather noisy squeak in a quiet environment, which was unexpected. Rather than send it back, I decided to remove the space bar key (easy enough to do, if you're not heavy-handed) and actually turned it around. That worked for a while, but then the sqeak returned. I then flipped it back to its original postion and got a little paint brush with some keyboard oil to lubricate the underside spring area just a little. That solved that issue, and is the only negative experience I had with the change.I'm a cack-handed, two finger typist mostly - apart from banging the space bar with the thumb of my left hand. I also tent to mistype a fair bit, so the back space key has to be instantly reachable with one of the fingers of my right hand, and accurate. Nothing worse than trying to delete a character and accidentally hitting insert, or another key in that general area. I'm comfortable doing reasonable typing speed on this new keyboard, although I have tended to find that sometimes I'm hitting function keys instead of numbers because obviously i'm watching the screen. This is almost certainly due to my stupid fingers rather than an issue with the keyboard.The keys themselves are touch lovely. Honestly, just the feel of them, and the firm way they move on the plate when depressed is great. It actually probably increases productivity because it feels so nice to type with it. I've often absently found myself stroking my hand across the keyboard just to feel the keys because they're just that smooth. You'll see what I mean if you try it. It's probably important for me to say that I can't emphasise how nice it is to work with a keyboard that feels this nice.Now this is an expensive keyboard because it's mechanical, and has the lovely backlighting options and all that, but why does it cost so much?There are 3 programmable connection buttons, so you have the potential to use it with up to 3 devices, should you want to, all by just bluetooth connections. This makes the unit very portable if you want to use it in different areas around the house, just for starters. I've now got it setup to work for my Mac, work laptop and gaming laptop and switching between them is just a matter of pushing whichever connection button has been configured. Ironically it wasn't something I really bought the unit for originally, it just turned out to be so handy that I'd probably have bought one much sooner, had I realised it could do this.The function keys are all cross purpose. Default mode has the function keys work for the usual media controls and screen brightness, keyboard colour settings and so on. Just hold down the function key and press escape once and then the function keys work as they would within any application or game you're using. It's that simple. So much easier than holding down func each time you want to use it's alternate command for every keypress otherwise. This feature has probably been around on other keyboards prior to this, but i've never had one, or noticed it, so it's worth a mention.There's no messing about with batteries for power on this keyboard either. For all i know it might actually take batteries - I never thought to check - but it has a USB 2 port at the back right-side corner for charging. It holds charge very well, and the logitech software will advise you how much remains. For me, i just put in one of those little magnet adaptors into the back of it and got a magnet charging cable, so i could alternate the one charging lead between this, the mouse (which uses the old micro USB connector) and my phone/ipad. No more clumsy pushing connectors in and out all the time, and damaging the casing trying to ram them in.The numeric keyboard also has a few dual functions on some of the keys so now, on either the Mac or PC, I can just press the lock key in the top right of keyboard and then the escape key in the top left of the keyboard and it's locked down with the screen blanked. It's only a little convenience but I found that so much nicer than sleeping a computer with the mouse, or giving my fingers cramped trying to windows L on one hand.You have the usual stands you can pull out on the underside of the keyboard to raise the back height and also one of the keys actually pops up the calculator, and works for both machines. Again, probably always been a keyboard feature but I've found that so handy since I realised I could do it.Expensive keyboard but it turned out to be so worth the price, I think. 100% recommend.
John Daly
7 januari 2025
The keyboard is great, the way they sell it is not.I bought this keyboard because I bought the mx 3 s mouse and was happy with it and thought I might try this mx keyboard. The image showed an American English layout so I bought it. The layout is not American English, it is international English. This is a sore point because the US EN, INT EN and UK EN keyboards are all available in Germany and if you get the wrong one because of bad labeling you aren’t really happy.Other than that I thought the MX mouse and keyboard could share device switching, unfortunately they don’t so that too is a minus point.The keyboard is being sold cheeper elsewhere on amazon too. So getting the wrong keyboard for to much money feels like being cheated.