The best Bluetooth keyboard at any price!
Written: Jun 28 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The keyboard is the best Bluetooth keyboard at any price. Clean, simple software interface.
Cons: The mouse ergonomics are not good.
The Bottom Line: The keyboard and mouse remain at the office. When I return, I want to simply open my laptop, start typing, and use the mouse with no hassles. This combo delivers.
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| it_architect's Full Review: Dell Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Bundle ... |
Rule #1: Finding reliable and non-quirky Bluetooth anything requires a lot of careful research.
I don't like throwing money away by doing exhaustive research that amounts to 5 times what the product costs, but with Bluetooth, you will repeat the purchasing and learning of new products that don't deliver until you master Rule #1.
What I wanted in a keyboard are:
1. Reliable and maintains its connection, unlike the Microsoft keyboard and mouse where myriads can be found for a fraction of the list price on e-bay.
2. No funny stuff like repeating characters and slow to wake up as with the Logitech diNovo. The separate numeric pad really doesn't make sense and you can't even do the alt numeric keypad keystrokes to get your ASCII characters. Moreover you get a very non-standard keyboard.
3. Automatically connects and I don't have to mess with it.
4. Looooong battery life.
5. A standard keyboard layout. I don't care if it is like a standard Desktop keyboard or a standard laptop keyboard. Two layouts is plenty.
At first I didn't think such an animal existed. I discovered it on the Dell site. It looks pretty normal in the picture, but when you get it, both the keyboard and mouse are far more elegant looking than the pictures show, and a very nice palm rest that does not show in the picture.
First the keyboard. What is not apparent until you get the keyboard is what the extra buttons are on the top. The 5 buttons on the left top of the keyboard are browser buttons. They are back, forward, stop, refresh, and home page. I can't imagine myself using these. Crossing just to the right of the Dell emblem are three buttons. The leftmost button is a shortcut to e-mail, followed by a shortcut to My Computer, followed by a button the brings up the Microsoft Calculator. Next you will see silver segments with a round silver thing in the middle. That isn't a joy stick. It is a volume knob so you don't have to go fishing for the volume applet. When you turn it, the word volume appears on the lower are of the screen and you can see a graphical progress bar as you turn the knob. The silver segments there are actually nearly flush buttons. There are 6 total around the knob. The leftmost button is the Mute button. When you press it, the work Mute appears at the bottom of your screen in red letters indicated it turned mute on. If you press it again, it shows again only in green, indicated you turned it off. The next 4 are VCR buttons. The one on the far right brings up Media Player or app of your choice. The only buttons that I see myself using are e-mail, calculator, volume, and mute. Most of the buttons are programmable to do what you want them to. The software is a Dell version of Set Point, and the Bluetooth receiver looks like a USB key which is a bit of a tip-off as to paternity of some of the components. I'm using the TM350 card built into my laptop instead of the USB receiver that came with the product. The software is a clean install and very well implemented. Batteries for the mouse and keyboard come in the box. The keyboard looks and feels exactly like the keyboards that come with their servers. I love this keyboard. It has no bad habits and has a very close to standard keyboard layout. Both are a rarity. They move 3 keys, the Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause keys above the numeric keypad to make room for the volume knob and media buttons. In my opinion, this is the best Bluetooth keyboard at any price.
Now for the mouse. The mouse works very well, is smooth, and has less trouble than my no-longer-used MX1000 laser mouse with any surface that I use it on. However, it takes some getting used to, and is not my favorite mouse. It's one of those mice that don't have hinges for the buttons, but one where the top front inside edge of the mouse flexes down. This means that to press the buttons without having to use excessive pressure, you need to get in the habbit of keeping your fingers near the center of the mouse when pressing down. Once I mastered that, we got along fine. The scroll wheel is the tilt variety with built in panning and pressing the wheel switches the wheel between scrolling and zooming. It works very well. The mouse also has two thumb buttons on the side for back and forward in the browser. I personally don't use that function on any mouse, but unlike my MX1000 mouse, these buttons are too firm, have too much travel, and are in too awkward of a position to want to use them for browser navigation. The mouse is no higher or wider than my laptop mouse, the Logitech V270, but it is 5 inches long. Other than that, it is a very nice mouse. It's attractive, moves easily, and most importantly, it works on any surface that I throw at it.
Next you are going to want to know about wake-up. All battery operated wireless devices either go to sleep after a period of inactivity, or feed the Everready share holders. The wakeup time on both the keyboad and mouse are very short. Neither seem to be more than 1/2 second, and unlike the diNovo, no repeated keystrokes. It wakes up even faster than my Logitech V270 mouse, which is nearly a second.
The environment that I'm using this with is the Dell Inspiron 9400 with TM350 internal Bluetooth module and the Widcomm Bluetooth stack, not the default XP SP2 Microsoft stack. I would hazard a guess that the reason people have so much trouble with the Microsoft Bluetooth hardware, is the Microsoft Bluetooth stack. Even the Logitech V270 keeps disconnecting from the Microsoft stack, and it doesn’t' auto-reconnect. Moreover the Microsoft stack is quite lame since it supports so few profiles. Who needs a Bluetooth stack that doesn't support headsets, and doesn't even support the most direct profile for interfacing with their own Outlook? When you install Bluetooth peripheral software, the install program often will not replace an existing Microsoft stack. There is a trick to preventing the Microsoft stack from automatically loading so that you can install a better Bluetooth stack. See the on-line forums for details.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 75.37
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Epinions.com ID:
it_architect
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Reviews written: 7
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