Arcade Lounge

Now available as an optional upgrade for the surface tension table, I thought it was time to shine some light on this dark and mysterious keyboard…

Well, where do I start…

The first impressions after opening the outer cardboard box was the nice, albeit large packaging. Everything I have ever bought from Logitech has been well packaged and this is no exception.

You can feel the quality as soon as you get your hands on it. It has a great weight and a very solid feel. It’s also ultra-thin at 11mm in height. The fold-out feet at the back of the unit are very sturdy, plus open out to the side, rather than the back. I don’t know about you, but my existing keyboard always seemed to collapse when I push it back, which is very annoying. Not a problem now though.

The keys themselves have a positive feel, like those of a laptop, using scissor switch technology. I did initially however find myself foolishly reaching for the numeric keypad on a few occasions!

Special function keys (homepage, email, play/pause etc) are accessed by holding the Fn key, bringing a whole new row of lights on above the standard Function keys. F9 to F12 are user-configurable, labeled A to D.
The looks… well, I’m not sure these photos will do it any justice, but I’ve tried to catch it in the best light with my limited means and lack of natural light. It’s hard to tell what lies beneath the surface when you take it out the box, but when you switch it on, it lights up to give you the full picture before fading back to nothing again.

After switching the keyboard on, I couldn’t stop touching the touch-pad. An orange halo fades in around the outside, remaining on whilst in use. Stop playinging with it and after a few seconds, it fades out again. This is such a nice touch, and like many other features, is purely aesthetic. Functionally it behaves as you would expect with a touch pad. The horizontal and vertical scroll functions are a little fiddly at first, but you soon get to grips by locating your digit on a small nipple before spinning your finger around madly.

Just like the touchpad, the volume control is another part you just have to play with. As you slide your finger up and down the non-tactile plexiglass volume slider, LEDs tracing your movent run along side to give visual feedback.

The Bluetooth dongle supplied is tiny, which is perfect. It connected first time without a problem.

The specification for the battery and charging is that a 5-minute charge will last for around 1 day. A full charge, which takes around 2 hours, will last you around 2 months… This obviously depends on how much you are playing with all the lights of course. I can’t vouch for the 2-months as yet, but I didn’t charge it for a few days after receiving it.

With an RRP of £150, you would expect a lot from such a product. It certainly looks and feels the part. Available as an upgrade option for your surface tension table at £100.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 1:44 pm and is filed under arcade table dev, arcade game news, toys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.