This is a review of the $27 navless keyboard I bought on Amazon.
I was browsing the buildapcsales subreddit and saw a mechanical keyboard for $27. That’s always worth a check, even though I don’t need another one of these things, and I clicked through and it was, amazingly, a 96 key keyboard without a dumbass shortened right modifier cluster. That’s right, it had a numpad, one of the only keyboards I know with a standard layout, just without the nav cluster. If someone can find me a good version of this, I’d love it.
Anyway, I picked the thing up purely based on the layout, and hey presto, it comes with MX blue clones, the best of the MX type switches. They don’t sound as bad as some people claim, and they also don’t feel bad. They all do feel largely similar with very few exceptions. There’s a reason this is the bog standard mechanical keyswitch: it’s pretty bland but good. Like a hamburger. I have had a keyboard with MX Blues as my #2 keyboard attached to my server for approximately 7 years. It’s the same keyboard. It works perfectly, and I can type on it for hours with no issues or any desires to use anything else. The Box Jades? In the box. Box Pinks? In the Box. Browns? In the box. Models M? In the box. Matias? In the box. Omnikey? In the box. Monoprice keyboard with Cherry MX blues? It gets use. It’s just too middle of the road to not.
These ones in particular though are not Cherry or Gateron or Kailh or Outemou or whatever, but one I don’t think I’ve heard of, but seems familiar nonetheless. Someone tell me if these are a major switch name. Jixian switches? They feel, surprise, just like MX Blues. It’s one of those where the switches kinda jut out of the case. This may or may not be to make the colours pop more, but it might be space saving or cost saving. I don’t know and I don’t know what this is called.
The rest of the keyboard build is
fine. Modern mechanical keyboards are largely all well built. This uses thick plastic with little, if any, flex. It has drainage holes in the bottom, and a nice cable channel. Also included is a keypuller and spare key. The key is Winkey sized, so what the ****, but that’s nice I guess. Also included are two feet with big fat rubber things on the end. This is nice. This is very nice. They’re a good height and angle and they stick on the desk. Perfect for what they’re supposed to be doing.
The cable is also fake gold plated! Nice!
In terms of size, it’s quite small, essentially the size of a compact tenkeyless, or, if you’re normal and don’t have any of those, take the numpad off your keyboard, and it’s the size of the keyboard from the left control to the right arrow. The bezels and spacing are small enough that it doesn’t take up much more space than that. They shoved the locklights in the top right by escape.
The lighting is real RGB with rainbow effects and ****. It doesn’t let you set the lighting per key, but it does have some features that illuminate certain keys only, or in a different colour, like on the numpad it lights them up like the objectively inferior navigation cluster. More on that dumbass nav cluster later. The lights are fairly bright, and the effects are simple to use with a few key combinations that I didn’t even read the manual for. That’s the test. I threw out the manual, and I don’t have the software that supposedly comes with this thing. Here’s a thing that shows its ripple effect when set to a pink colour for the whole board.
There’s a button on the top right that changes the numpad/nav cluser to standard M type nav cluster only, with the inverted T arrows and so on. That’s kinda nifty if you’re a mentalist. I mean, I wouldn’t have done it this way, but whatever. I’m sure that some of you people would use it. Look how the lights change. Note the arrows are lit but not the above cluster. More on that later.
You can see the lighting through the keycaps because they’re thin doubleshot plastic something or other, and the doubleshotting was done cheaply, so they have that stencil look about them. The crazy part is that they kept the stencil look on the PAD PRINTED SUBLEGENDS. Like, dude, you know you can just print a ****ing circle, right?
Also, the numpad are the default legends on a numpad with pad printed sublegends if you use the top right button, except for 2, which is an up arrow. The only problem is that 2 is a ****ing DOWN ARROW, which is missing. So they appear to have defaulted to the numpad at the top, but the arrow keys on the bottom, but those are mutually exclusive. You can’t use the bottom arrow keys while using the top nav cluster. Also, in pad printing the numpad legends, you can’t see which key is insert and which key is delete. Yes, I know which ones they are, zero and period, but what the hell man. This could be mitigated by using a different keycap set. Luckily, I have such a keycap set, but the next problem is that this **** is nonstandard, so if I want to use SA profile I’m going to have to kludge it a bit. Just make sensible keycaps to start with, *looks at box* Mechanical Keyboard company! I don’t need to get obsessed with keycaps like the rest of the world, I don’t care if they’re good or bad or anything really, but make them make ****ing sense for the love of god.
Let’s look at the box by the by. Is this the most generic looking box you’ve ever seen in your entire life? It definitely is mine.
Okay so I wrote that using the $27 keyboard and it’s been my daily driver for the past 4 days. I just went back to the Model F and it’s good...but so is the $27 keyboard. Is one appreciably better than the other? For me, yes, I think the Model F is a much nicer keyboard to use, but is it so much nicer that I would tell someone to spend over a hundred bucks on it, or even worse, two hundred to three hundred bucks for the AT model? God no. If you’re interested in navless, buy this thing for the cost of a dinner out at Applebee’s with one friend. I'm going to recommend it to everyone who is interested in a nicer keyboard than the one that came with the computer who doesn't want to shell out any money.
