| nMedia HTPCKB Media Center Wireless Keyboard |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Input Devices | ||||||||
| Written by Mat Thompson - Edited by Olin Coles | ||||||||
| Thursday, 28 August 2008 | ||||||||
Page 4 of 6
Keyboard PerformanceThe back of the nMedia HTPCKB's box indicates that the remote works for 10 meters. I can't say for certain if that's true, as my living room was quite small, but I found that it did, indeed, function correctly with my HTPC when I walked around the room and there didn't appear to be any lag or missing signals. The trackballs on both devices are optical evidenced by the red light that you can see in glowing inside the devices when you turn the wheels. The keyboard's trackball has a very smooth turn that feels very light and doesn't require much force to move. The remote's trackball requires a bit more force to turn. I assume this is meant to maintain precision of the turning ball so that your thumb doesn't slip.
The first problem I encountered, though, was that both the remote and the keyboard have different trackball calibrations. That is to say, one rotation of the trackball on the keyboard is the equivalent of 2-3 rotations of the trackball on the remote. This can certainly be a problem if you plan on using both together. One other, more minute nitpicks of the devices is that the keys on the keyboard are a bit stiff and require that I push down harder for the keys to register. After about 10 hours of use, the devices disconnected once. This necessitated the press of the ID buttons on the USB dongle and then successive presses on the remote, which is located near the batteries under the battery cover and on the keyboard, which is located near the left mouse buttons. Afterward, though, I didn't not experience any problems with disconnection. Each device will go to sleep after a certain amount of time and must be activated by pressing a button on the device. It cannot be brought out of sleep by moving the trackball. nMedia's remote really shined with watching movies as I was able to use all of the playback function keys, like play, pause, stop, etc with my computer like I were watching a DVD. Both Windows Media Player 10 as well as Media Player Classic functioned well with the remote.
|
||||||||
