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2013 Noppoo Choc Mini review

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Surnia:
Hey guys, here's my second attempt at a review. As an early caution, this is going to be a huge wall of text. The boards I have in the house that I can use for comparisons are a POM based Keycool 87, ABS Filco Majestouch 2 Ninja, and a Das model S Silent (I believe those are ABS). If you guys want any comparisons to that and I'll take pics/whatever you guys need!


Table of Contents

Updates
Introduction
Differences
Overview
Functions
Keycaps
Feel and Sound
Conclusion

Updates
May 1 - Initial review posted. No pictures yet!
May 1 - Anchors for ToC applied. Thanks CPTBadAss!
May 1 - Pics!
May 3 - Small edits, and Android OTG adapter arrived!

Introduction

If you guys have been following the market of smaller form keyboards, the current rage is all for the 60% units. However, the 75% layout is still hanging around in two main forms, the Keycool 84 and the more classic Noppoo Choc Mini. The Keycool offered some great features the Noppoo has skimmed over; namely a more standard keycap layout (standard sized space bar), and a more logical home/end cluster. From the top down we get Delete, Home, PgUp, PgDn, End and Insert hidden with Fn+F12. The constant changes to the Noppoo Mini have at least addressed the odd sized modifiers and made the home/end cluster to be a more standard layout (matching those condensed laptop setups). The board reviewed here was purchased from Qtan5370, who you can find at his vendor forum or at his respective stores (vendio or Ebay). At time of invoicing, the keyboard was $75.99 USD.

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Differences

There are not many differences between the 2013 version and the 2012 version, however they are notable to being significant to match the primary competitor in this size: the Keycool 84. The modifier row has now been converted into a standard 1.25X on all keys, so replacement keycaps here are going to be much easier to procure. They retained their 5.5X spacebar to obtain this layout however, so the spacebar is still impossible to replace (unless you 3D print your own!). A new Detachable cable has been included with the Choc Mini, which is a great change. The cable routing is very secure on the side passages, holding the cord in very well. The straight outlet however is a bit loose, but this ensures that the cable won’t be damaged. Overall, the cable routing enables 5 possible cable positions: Straight out, rear exit on the left or right, or side exit on the left or right.

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A word of caution with the USB cable: on FIRST insert mine clicked, and grabbed hold of the cable really tightly. I could not remove the cable at all, and had to use pliers to remove the cable. Subsequent inserts after that have been trouble free, however it is something to be aware of.

As noted in some other threads, the case appears to be a new design as well. A battery door for two AAA cells is built in with no leads, and a small power switch hole is just above the USB plug location. Qtan5370 has clarified that the board is NOT directly wireless capable, however the case appears to be shared with a new Noppoo product currently named and referred to as the M2.


Overview

The refresh to the 2013 line saw changes to the modifier layout, and a change to the case. The keys are now a standard 1.25X on all the modifiers, but they had to maintain their 5.5X space bar to fit them all. The keys themselves are made from PBT, approximately 1.5-1.75mm thick. Please note that I'm one of those strange people that likes their space bars backwards, so excuse me if it looks odd.

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The keyboard comes with the USB cable, a ring style Keycap puller, and the keyboard itself wrapped in bubble wrap. There are no additional accessories. The dimensions of the board are 32.0cm x 12.9cm.

Noppoo uses a Costar stabilizer layout, however the parts are predictably thinner and cheaper (they had to cheap out somewhere!). As seen here, the stabilizers are much thinner, and the plastic is much more ductile than those found on the Filco. This coupled with the fact that they require pliers to remove (they hold REALLY well) makes it a frustrating experience to remove them for swapping/greasing. One of two inserts on my space bar was broken, and it nearly resulted in the insert tearing in half and nearly ruining my space bar. My personal recommendation is to pickup a new set of stabilizer inserts if you plan on doing any modding. The Bars themselves look thinner than those I found on the Das and Filco, but they don't appear to cause any issues other than some extra rattling. A nice coat of lube will solve that problem however.

(stabilizer pics)

The Keyboard is also plate mounted on what appears to be a slightly thin uncoated plate (silver colour shows through). Unforutnately I have not taken the case apart to take a reference to this, however the keyboard has the chorus of ping people were concerned about with the Filco keyboards prior to the great GH crash. By quickly tapping a key and letting it spring back, each key WILL ping, aside from the larger stabilized keys. I'm assuming the resonance of a thinner plate is causing the volume of the ping to be amplified slightly. This does not bother me at all, but might be a consideration for others.

The keyboard will arrive utterly ungreased from factory, so a nice tear down for the stabilized keys to apply grease is a great idea. I use aerosol Super Lube sprayed into a bottle cap, and applied with a sharpened barbeque skewer.

Functions

The Noppoo as most people are aware, is NKRO capable over USB. I can confirm this to work on any Windows workstation, however I do not know its capacity to work with any other operating system. I will be picking up an OTG adapter for my Samsung tablet soon (slow Chinese mail…), and I’ll see if the keyboard’s capable of working with android. I have not tested PS/2, however I assume the functionality would be identical. A noted workaround is to use a USB to PS/2 converter, then another active PS/2 to USB converter to bring it back to 6KRO over USB and enabling full compatibility to all other OSes.

*edit* The OTG adapter arrived, and the Noppoo Plugged in perfectly. Absolutely no issues whatsoever, so it looks like the Noppoo is Android compatible, or at least for samsung devices!

A couple of other features they managed to include are quite interesting; an integrated numpad, a winlock, a limited amount of media keys, debounce control, and a switch lock.

The media keys are centered around the WASD cluster, and control volume and basic playback. There's no additional controls to access media players or other things.

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Win Lock is simple hold Fn and press the win key and it will lock it out. Switch lock is shared with the Delete key, hold Fn and a light will turn on to indicate that the Caps key and left Ctrl key have been reversed.

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The numpad is what I purchased the Noppoo for. As a lot of my work entails copious amounts of numerical data entry, the hidden numpad is great for my uses. Fn + Print Screen activates the numpad, which replaces the right hand alpha cluster with an offset numpad. It does take a small amount of time to get used to the new layout, however it is quite easy to use. I have no problems whatsoever using it, however the offset might be difficult for some people to adapt to. The double zero key has been an interesting one for me to use, as I'm not used to seeing it in standard keyboard layouts. Aquakeytest seems to report that it presses the 0 key twice VERY quickly and registers two presses only. Holding the key down does not continue outputting double 0s.

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A feature not found in many other keyboards is the ability to adjust the debounce. Debounce is how much the keyboard needs to aggregate signals into a single "press" that is sent to the computer. This is necessary due to the simple fact that we're moving from an analog to digital system. All mechanical keys in any industry face the same problem; the physical nature of a switch means that it will bounce between on and off states VERY quickly near the point of actuation either due to the key bouncing, or minute arcing from the contacts when they're close. Since we're working on keyboards either polling at crazy fast rates over USB or directly interrupting the system with a PS/2 input, all of those will register as key presses. If debounce were not included, we'd see something akin to having 10 letters register on each key press.

Debounce helps this problem by allowing the keyboard to take all inputs from within a set time frame, and register it only as a single press. Inherently a necessary solution, but in some cases the default time intervals might be too short (double presses), or too long (reduced input rate due to clustering too many inputs into one).
Fn and F10/F11 either increase or decrease the debounce on the keyboard, enabling you to adjust for keys that might be double tapping or if you're particularly insane/sensitive, the ability to adjust the debounce down to increase your WPM/APM. your mileage may vary, but for me I'm keeping it at default. I'm unsure if the settings are retained after the keyboard is unplugged.

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Keycaps

The Noppoo uses a nicely textured finish on their keycaps, with a slightly sandy/dry feeling to them. As compared to ABS, I've heard some great comparisons and the best one I could relate to is that ABS has a sort of greasy feel, even when new and compared against PBT/POM. PBT has a sort of grippy feel to the plastic along with the texture, what you can consider and feel as a higher coefficient of friction compared to POM.

POM on the Keycool unit we have in the house also has a great sandy texture to the keys, but your fingers can dance across them far more easily. Unfortunately the Keycool isn't mine so I don't get to play with it as often as I'd like to (it also uses reds, which I don't like) but my preference for materials is on the fence. I prefer POM for a household use; where I can really sit back and enjoy the typing but for work PBT feels like a much better material.

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The lettering on the keys is stated to be lasered. If you look VERY carefully at the keys, you can sometimes see indentations inside the lettering, and that is the only evidence I have that the keys might be lasered. The font colour is a nice subtle gray, and I love how it blends into the keys slightly.

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As I mentioned earlier, the caps are of a thicker material. There's debate starting right now around the forums as of May 1st, 2013 if the PBT is considered thick or thin. From all the boards I have in the house, here's what I can see. In the picture below, from left to right we have a Majestouch Ninja ABS keycap, a Das ABS(?) keycap, Techkeys doubleshot ABS, the Noppoo PBT cap, Techkeys PBT cap, a Keycool POM cap, and an ABS Keycool cap from their 22 keypad.

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In order of decreasing thickness: Noppoo > Keycool ABS/POM > Techkeys PBT > Filco=Das=Techkeys ABS

As you can see there, the Noppoo's material is much thicker than all the other caps I presently own. The measurement is an estimated thickness between 1.5-1.75mm thick. I do not know if this would classify as the current generation of "thick" PBT caps, however in reference to the caps I have access to, it is thick.

The profile appears to be Cherry profile for the keycap height. At the moment I don't have any cherry key references for the other rows other than the Function row, so I am unable to make full comparison.


Feel and Sound

As mentioned in the keycaps section, I described the feel of the PBT caps. It is definitely different to ABS that I’m used to, and it is great. My fingers no longer feel perpetually greasy when typing, and it yields a great effect after a typing session when you’re done and your fingertips feel like they’ve been gently caressed. The caps even feel like they’re pulling just enough excess moisture from your fingers so that they’re not sweaty and gross but as if they’ve just been wiped by the softest fresh cotton towels.

The smaller footprint of the keyboard is great for use in areas with limited space, but I still prefer a full 104 layout for absolute comfort. The layout of the Noppoo mimics those found in HP laptops (although those are mainly ISO and the Noppoo here is ANSI). If you’re coming from one of those, the transition is very simple and quick as the keys are in an identical layout (however spacing is different, HP changes that around and it bothers me a LOT). Overall a very comfortable size to use on a desktop or even as an overlay on a laptop while retaining full access to all function keys, arrow cluster, and home/insert cluster without them being hidden behind a Fn layer.

The sound of the Noppoo is amazing. The thicker PBT caps take out a lot of the higher pitched sounds associated with the MX switches, including bottoming out. It drops the entire sound profile into something more like a subdued clack. The POM keycaps on the Keycool 87 also do an excellent job at this, but I’d say they sound more like a hybrid thump/clack sound.

The Chorus of Springs has returned in the Noppoo, as I mentioned in the Overview. To me it is a lovely sound but it is quiet and sits more in the backround as you type normally. I don’t bottom out with the MX blacks so I can’t comment on how loud it might get if you really do hammer away on lighter switches.


Conclusion

In conclusion, The Choc Mini is a great board. Through successive generations the board has gained and lost features, many of which appear to be a response to the market’s demands. The only major downsides to the board at the moment are the fact that the NKRO over USB tends to break with non-windows OS (fixable with a work around), the board arrives completely un-lubed, and the utterly non-standard spacebar. It offers a great size with full functionality of a 104 board, and offers some interesting functions that some might consider desirable. It comes with a great set of default thick PBT caps with lasered text. If you’re looking for a great compact board with full functionality of a 104 and are mainly a windows user, the Noppoo is your keyboard.


If you guys want any additional pictures, please ask!

Surnia:
[reserved]
in case the thing goes over with pics...

CPTBadAss:
Really awesome review. I especially loved the part that me about debounce and the explanation of the modifiers. Don't even apologize for writing a "wall of text" since I think that's how reviews should be.

That being said, you can set up that Table of Contents to allow you to skip around if you wish to do so. Check out my Post Meetup review for an idea of how that might work or feel free to PM me if you have questions about bbcode formatting.

iAmAhab:
Nice write up, I could not for the love of god figure out what the Fn + F10/11 combination was good for on mine. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

Surnia:

--- Quote from: CPTBadAss on Wed, 01 May 2013, 11:42:52 ---Really awesome review. I especially loved the part that me about debounce and the explanation of the modifiers. Don't even apologize for writing a "wall of text" since I think that's how reviews should be.

That being said, you can set up that Table of Contents to allow you to skip around if you wish to do so. Check out my Post Meetup review for an idea of how that might work or feel free to PM me if you have questions about bbcode formatting.

--- End quote ---

Thanks CPTBadAss!

I was trying to work with the anchor tags, but it wasn't working in previews... I'll give it another shot though.

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