Keyboards come in many shapes, sizes, and colours these days. Gone are the days of the standard, old, beige keyboard with its 107 keys each in the same colour of beige. True, there were some specialist systems that went for the black look, but these were few and far between. The “gaming accessories” market simply did not exist. Now we have all sorts of doodads, like lighting systems, media controls, a variety of layouts, and, of course, pricepoints.
The Skytech Gaming Keyboard sits in the lower end of the pricerange, but is a rather nice piece of kit. Starting with its striking looks, you notice, as soon as you plug in the cable, the fabulous rainbow of colours shown to you, going from green to blue going across the keyboard, and illuminating the keys in a lovely glow. This makes using the keyboard in low light situations a breeze. This can also be changed with the dedicated On/Off button, to not only turn the lights off, but to flip between three different rainbow effects, including a rather nice pastel colour palette. The keyboard also has a solid metal backplate, which gives it adequate strength.
This particular keyboard is setup in the US style keyboard layout, which means certain keys are swapped, or in different positions, which is no issue to setup in windows, but can lead to confusion if you fail to notice it at first. The swapping of the “ and @ is the main issue for most people. But, a quick flip of this on Windows is all it takes to get you up and running. But, one thing is that this results in the backspace key to be reduced to the size of a standard key, which is less than optimal, and resulted in a few misplaced slashes (which is what is placed in this new space).
One feature I really loved in this keyboard is that the bottom row, where the spacebar lives, is almost double the height of most other keyboards, meaning that the large Space, Alt and Control keys are perfect for long gaming sessions. I am not sure what switches are in this keyboard, but the keys have a nice, light tactile feel, and a rather satisfying click to them.
But, how does it play? Pretty darn well. Starting off with the standard test of Minecraft, i was able to jump right in without missing a beat. Not that I expected any difference, to be honest, but that chonky bottom row is bliss to play on, and can really take a beating. Next I tested it on my A500 Mini, and was initially worried that it was not working, but this turned out to be because I needed to update the Mini, after that it worked just fine, and switching between abilities during a game of Lemmings 2 was as natural as it could be. It was also my first time using a Keyboard on the A500 Mini, and I could not have asked for more.
Finally, I hooked it up to its final resting place, My arcade cabinet, and used it to set up thousands of new games. Typing was fast and accurate, and felt great. Also, as a bonus, it fit nicely between the screen and buttons perfectly, giving unrestricted access to those ever important WASD keys.
All in all, I am very pleased with the Skytech Keyboard, and even though it in no way blows me away feature wise, its a solid little keyboard that is a pleasure to use. My daughter also prefers it over the old keyboard when playing Roblox on the cabinet, also due to the large spacebar, which is perfect for her little fingers.
You can find the Skytech Keyboard on Amazon.
If you never clean the keyboard then it could last for a very very long time. But you do clean ityouu will immediately notice that the letters and numbers on the keys will start to fade away.
After about 2 months of daily use, 18 of the most-used keys have the letters faded away entirely and the coating is worn away where my fingers/thumbs press on the left Shift and Space bar. I am a touch typer, but it is annoying and ugly and I think represents poor quality.