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Zippy EL-610 Mini Keyboard |
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Written by Mikhail Ivanenkov
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Sunday, 01 July 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3
The lack of buttons didn't stop Zippy from improvising. Laptop owners should be familiar with the purple Fn key, though here it's used slightly differently. Some keys have alternate labels in purple like the Fn button. You would think that holding down the Fn key and pressing those would produce said characters on the screen. However, this is untrue. In fact, the only purpose of the Fn button (or so it appears to me) is to toggle the Num Lock, which shares a button with the Scroll Lock. Why this was done I have no clue. In my opinion, it would have been a lot easier to just make the Fn key into the Num Lock and leave the Scroll Lock alone. That aside, there's also a Windows start menu key to the left of the space bar and an application button on the right.
Then there are the dreaded green LEDs once again. As I mentioned earlier, good luck replacing them, as I myself haven't been able to find a non-forceful method of opening the keyboard. One thing that the EluminX board lacks is an on/off switch, something that's been addressed with the EL-610, though I keep mine on constantly. During the day there's no point because you can't see the illumination, but there's no noticeable heat production from the light source so I see no reason to turn it off. What's more, once it's dark enough to see some of the light, the illumination accents the area around the keys, making non-memorized buttons easier to locate. The sleep and power hotkeys are also a great addition for obvious reasons.
Take note of the alternate purple labels on some of the keys. When the Num Lock is activated (Fn + ScrLk), these buttons become a keypad. However, this feature is somewhat questionable due to the fact that the keys are slightly out of alignment (just like all qwerty keyboards), making speedy calculations a bit difficult. In terms of button placement/size, the backspace key is a tad small while the enter key is slightly oversized. The solution is pretty evident to me: extend the backspace button, make the enter key smaller and move the backslash button down a notch. Finally, there are a couple plastic stubs on the F and J keys for "blind" hand alignment.
When I first received the keyboard I was slightly annoyed by a few "defects". First off, the home key had one corner out of place, though it was easy to snap back in. The bottom front of the keyboard silver border was split in two (upper and lower half) and I needed to snap them back together. Looking at a few other reviews it seems I'm not the only one. Furthermore, one of the screws on the back was out and rolling about in the plastic container and two of the four threads were stripped. None of these are major issues but they don't exactly help first impressions.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 13 July 2007 )
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