Testing

To test the keyboard, I decided I would write this review on it, literally 2 cm away from my laptop… I did a quick test of the range, and the quoted figure of 10m seems about right.

The first thing that I noticed was that the touchpad doesn’t get turned off while typing which means every now and again the cursor will jump back a couple of lines as I accidentally hit the pad. This is another reason why there should be a small driver distributed with the keyboard.

Another thing that I noticed was that as the function button is in the extreme bottom left of the board, you can end up pressing it accidentally instead of Ctrl. This means that using shortcuts such as bold (Ctrl + B) end up with your text turning to a lowercase b instead of thicker type. If the ‘Fn’ button was moved one key left (swapping with Ctrl) there would be no problem and I’m sure other people will find this annoying.

Using the touchpad was just like a normal laptop but the scroll strip began to get a little annoying. As there is nothing that differentiates the strip from the touchpad itself, you can find yourself straying into the scroll part and flying down the page you’re looking at. After a short learning curve this no longer becomes a problem.

The keys are nice and responsive and aren’t too hard or soft, and make a nice muffled click sound when pressed. The keyboard doesn’t feel cramped as long as you’re not looking for a special character like ‘\’ or ‘#’ which are placed in odd positions.

While I thought that the lack of the numberpad would be annoying, I’m yet to miss it. The keyboard has all of the most used keys on it, including the Windows key and context menu key. The media enthusiast will miss the media buttons that are almost standard on keyboards these days.

In a test that I’d rather not have ‘carried out’, I managed to spill a full glass of water (25cl of the finest spring H20) onto the keyboard. Instantly it stopped working. This is where the on/off or transmitting LED would have been useful, but after giving the 540RF a day to dry out, it worked fine.

It was nice to see that branded (Energiser) batteries were provided, so KeySonic aren’t trying to cut costs with sub-par batteries. Using the fact that the keyboard uses 7mA max and 5mA in standby (ready to type, just not sending data) and 150 μA in sleep mode (essentially off), and the Energizer batteries pump 1250 mAh, then the keyboard should last just over 200 hours of continuous typing. Given that most use their keyboard for ~5 hours a day, the 540RF should last for about 40 days. A new battery costs £0.43, so a new set will be £1.75 meaning yearly this keyboard will cost you ~£20, unless you decide for rechargeable batteries. Maths lesson over.

The best use for this keyboard has to be presentations. As the 540 is small, it can easily fit into your laptop bag you can use it to fully control your laptop from a distance.