Lighting control
The advertised feature of this keyboard is its phone integration. When your cellphone rings, the keyboard’s 10-key keypad lights up with a little “LED dance”, which is a matrix of LEDs that cycle every 1 second or so. When you first plug in the keyboard, this operation is performed. The main keyboard area does not respond and does not light up, even if your phone does ring. To turn the main area on, you must first press an ON/OFF switch located on the top right of the keyboard. It is a toggle switch, so when depressed, the blue LEDs light up, and when released, turn off.
The blue LEDs are very vivid and each key has its own small dedicated diode. The spacebar could stand to have 2 or three LEDs, because one is not enough to light it up sufficiently. The overall light produced by these 87 LEDs can illuminate your desk, and you could actually read by them in a dark room (or dark LAN party garage). Unfortunately there is no way to turn on the 10-key pad unless you can make your cellphone ring.
If you live by your cellphone, this novel feature may just tickle you enough to choose this keyboard over others. The keyboard has some radio circuitry that detects the presence of a cell phone ringing, so your phone must be in close proximity for this feature to work. Since there is no way to tie a particular cell phone, then your keyboard may alert you to your neighbor’s calls!
Although this is a well constructed keyboard, gamers may find its layout cumbersome. Those used to typing on a laptop will prefer this keyboard, as it has a similar layout, but is more responsive than a typical laptop’s keys. The brightness of this keyboard can help those who need help seeing their keys, as complicated flight simulators and other games have many special key mappings. If you’re doing heavy document editing, then the odd placement of the highly used editing keys (Delete, Insert, Home, End) will definately cause a few stumbles. I have no idea why the Euro key was given the prime real estate on the bottom left of the keyboard: even if the European audience hailed it, I cannot see it being used so much that it needs to be the easiest key to press on the whole keyboard.
Taking everything in, this is a light-use keyboard that will definately get you attention at LAN parties: first for generating such a bright blue glow, and second for taking the most rockets-to-the-face.
CrazyPC was kind enough to sponsor this unit. The Logisys Phone Smart LED Keyboard can be purchased direcly from Crazy PC.
 |
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
