It was a good day. I received two keyboards. I was called by a friend to visit the old office as the team still had something to give me as a farewell gift but it had arrived late. Look at what I got!
The packaging (no photo available at the moment). Keyboard was packed into a white, blank cardboard box which on the other hand was wrapped into a flip chart paper having beautiful hearts hand-drawn with neon color marker pens. Pure awesomeness!
This keyboard is a good start but it falls short on couple of rather important things:
- The layout is ridiculous, it resembles nothing that’s out there in the markets
- Comic Sans font is definitely going to split people into two camps
- The diamond shaped layout of arrow keys is rarely found from the markets and is not as comfortable as the inverted T-shaped layout
- Many keys fail to register without excessive display of power
- The KRO is something like 2 or 3. Not an issue to me though, but then again, kids might get confused on the fact that all the keys their palm hits won’t get registered. Also, why should kids be taught to learn to live with inferior quality...?
- I think it’s a bit contradictory that the labels are lowercased while having keycaps this big and color coded. Keycaps of this size imply the target group of children under 6 or something but kids of that age are still learning their alphabets in uppercase
But it has its strengths as well:
- The colors and the color coding scheme is excellent. Red ones clearly mark the numbers, blues mark the text formatting and editing keys, greens are the consonants, purples are the vowels and yellows are the punctuations. However, since the keyboard is imported from the UK, it lacks y, ä, ö and å from the vowels
- Esc key produces quite nice clack when bottomed down
- Nice and greased stabilizers on wider keys
- The keycaps are real solid and thick! They don’t bend or anything
- My guess is that the keycaps are pad-printed but they are very well made. Can’t feel the printing nor can’t scratch it off with fingernails. Even with a metal paper knife the printing won’t come off as easy as it does on many super market keyboards. You can see my attempts with the knife at the tip of the number 6
The origin of this “SKU 624” keyboard remains as a mystery to me but I’ve seen similar boards perhaps from the same Chinese OEM, like this http://www.ceratech.co.uk/cpages/keyboa ... lo-usb.htm which even has mechanical switches (ALPS, according to Ripster's formerly available wiki in GH).
I conclude this review by stating that making a good keyboard for children is far from being an easy (and cheap) task just like making good music for children. This keyboard doesn’t succeed in either one of them. However, the gesture made by the former team was truly heartwarming
