A closer look

Ideazon kindly sent me a Zboard to review, and it arrived to my door in a battered cardboard box that is not worthy of a photo.

I quickly stripped the box away and I was left with something that looked pretty awesome. Ideazon have really thought about product packaging and have come up with a very eye-catching design. The companies ‘Z’ logo features heavily in any of their printed publications, and I can only say that that is a good thing.

On the packaging, there are plenty of statistics and marketing blurb to get you to buy this product. I actually think that most people will order off the net and not see this package as its meant to be which is a shame; but its still pretty cool.

The box was superficially damaged, and inside the damage can be seen to lower side of the board. However, it does not get seen and neither does it affect operation at all.

The product comes with a fairly hefty instruction booklet with a CD inside the front cover, the Zboard base unit, the gamer keyset, the usual QWERTY keyset and a wrist rest. The English version of the manual is only a mere 14 pages long, but the information is in-depth and helpful. It’s also laid out exceptionally well providing all the information that you need to know.

The keysets are simply plastic plus a small interface chip that tells the board what keyset you have in the base unit. They simply fold in and out of the base unit with ease, and then you clip it down to make sure that the chip can be read. On a side note, if you are ever in a hurry to change keyset, I managed to do it in 3.5 seconds J. The ability to put in new keysets means that you can use the branded special edition keys from the Zboard website. These are keysets that are laid out in the best possible way for the individual games; for example, the Doom3 keyset. The gamer keyset is fairly generalised for many games.