Intro:

    While there have been a few EL keyboards already put on the market, one more can't hurt, right? I didn't think so. Today, I look at a new blue EL-lit keyboard from FlexiGlowHK. As with anything I have seen in the past, FlexiGlow's products have been great quality, and easily worth the price of admission. So how about this keyboard? Read on to find out!

Features:

• Translucent keys

• Electro-Luminescent lighting panel that illuminates the translucent keyboard keys.

• PS/2 Interface

• Key numbers 105/106

• 18 Multimedia keys

• Soft tactile feedback

• Luminescence power switch: On/Off

• Compatible with all Windows operating systems

Specifications:

• Input power - 5V +/- 5% 250mA.

• Keyboard cable - 180cm long.

• Keyboard Weight - 570 grams

• Keyboard dimensions - 150(L) x 390(W) x 30(H) mm

• EL life span - 60 000 hours

• Fully compatible with Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/NT.

• FCC and CE compliant.

Close pictures of the box:

    If you want to skip the features and specs above, if you hadn't already, just go look at the pictures below. There are two different colors of the keyboard available; black with white translucent keys, and white with white translucent keys. We'll be looking at the black today, but the white only differs in surrounding color. They both light up in blue.

(1) Features and keys	(2) About, and color of the kb	(3) Light me up!

The front of the box:

    Looking below, you can see the Front/Top of the box.The graphics are adequate, and would look nice in a retail environment. Others may not care what the box looks like, and I usually don't, but if the packaging looks pleasant, that is good marketing. And I like to point those things out... You already saw the back of the box in the first 3 pictures...

(4)

    Opening the box, you are greeted with what you see in picture 5, along with an informational sheet that tells about the multimedia keys, and a driver floppy disk. We'll look into the software shortly. The keyboard cable, as mentioned above, is 180CM. That's 70.2 Inches, or just about 6 feet for the only country in the world that doesn't use the metric system (Editor's note: Don't forget Burma and Liberia are still with us!). Lastly, this keyboard is only PS/2. I wouldn't mind a USB one, but since the PS/2 ports still seem to go the way of ISA slots, it works.

(5)	(6)

The keyboard and multimedia keys:

    Multimedia keys are popular on just about every keyboard nowadays. Personally, I just use my keyboard to type with, but the inclusion of said multimedia keys should appeal to those who actually do use them.

    From picture 7 and 8, left to right, the keys are: web home, email, page back, page forward, web search, web refresh, web favorites, web stop, media player launch, volume down, volume up, mute, media stop, previous media track, play/pause media, next media track, my computer, sleep, and lastly, an on/off button for the EL lighting. Of course there are LED's for caps lock, num lock, and scroll lock which glow a bright green. I'd prefer blue, to match the keyboard, or red even, but green works...

(7)	(8)

    The keys are very low, and much like a laptop keyboard. The keys push down easily, and don't give very much noise in feedback. Depending on how you type, a quiet typist could easily carry on a chat session in a room with someone else sleeping. I'll leave that one alone... The keyboard is smaller than a conventional keyboard, if you didn't pick up on that already. I'll show it in comparison to a laptop on the next page.

(9)

The stance:

    Some keyboards have swing out feet that adjust the height of the back of the keyboard for better ergonomics. This one has that, well, enabled by default. You can see in picture 10 what I mean. I don't have a protractor anymore, so I can't measure it for you. Sorry. The feet are rubber, and are located in the four corners of the keyboard to keep it sturdy on your desk. It does that well. Not once did it slip around on a laminated pseudo wood desk.

(10)	(11)

The software:

    The driver came of course on floppy as mentioned above. I would have liked to have seen a small CD, seeing that the floppy drive IS becoming an endangered species in some parts of the PC world. Opening up the contents of the floppy, we see below...

(s1)

    I did have the strangest bug though. The laptop has a USB floppy drive on it, and the floppy drive refused to read the driver disk. It read fine in my workstation (Internal floppy). I eventually had to copy the setup file off the original disk, and put that on another floppy, and the USB floppy read it fine then. Ok, I hadn't seen that in many years...

    I chose the 2K driver for XP pro, which seems logical to me, but to some, it might not seem so. No place on the packaging, nor the brief information sheet, is there mention of what to use. For instance, I'd use the 98 one for 9X based OS's, like 95, 98, 98SE, and WinME. <--Ack to ME... And the NT one, I'm assuming would work for the flavors of Windows NT before Windows 2000. I can't vouch for anything that I just said, other than the 2k driver worked fine in XP for me here.

    Oh, and don't lose your disk. At the time of writing there is no download of the driver, or an updated version on FlexiGlow's site. If it's important to you, I'd make a copy of the floppy, hehe, I made a rhyme (Editor's note: Don't copy that floppy), or just burn the drivers to a CD. And probing around, believe it or not, I can't find who makes the driver either. Oh well...

    Please continue on, to the final page...


 

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