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The 5Q hit Kickstarter for the first time more than two years ago, where it managed to reach its initial goal of $ 100,000 in crowdfunding funding to finish with more than half a million dollars promised . Its initial release was scheduled for January 2017 and postponed earlier this year. This has been a long wait, although anyone who has already funded a physical project is very familiar with this pain.
Now, it's here, with the q-Desktop app that you will use to get all your feeds set up. Want to be notified when your favorite author tweets? Or when the cameras in your house go off? You may have small messages like those sent directly to your keyboard, within certain limits. The $ 199 5Q and the $ 249 focused on X50Q games are not displayed. Instead, the notifications appear as changes to the lighting scheme of the keys and you can choose the keys and what you want them to represent. It's like a secret code that you design yourself, with the entire keyboard as a backdrop.
For example, I configured it so that the "E" key become blue every time Engadget tweets. The space bar will light if a Trello card is assigned. And the "J" will turn white every time my brother runs on Twitch. These were all easy to do because they use IFTTT and Zapier to get things done. If you know these services, creating your own applets should be child's play. Even if you have never used them before, it's not hard to understand. Just search for the service you want to receive notifications for, and select Das Keyboard as the destination. You will be asked to choose a key, a color and a uniform behavior, that is to say if you want it to blink, to breathe or simply to pass a rainbow. nuances.
If that still seems too much work, the q-Desktop has a ton of pre-made applets to choose from in its "Signal Center". It's where you set up the controls, but it's also where your notifications are turned on after you turn on your keyboard. The main q-Desktop dashboard and signal center are the only way to remove the keyboard notifications once they appear. Signal Center also sends a visible alert to your desktop, making the color function of the individual key completely redundant. I was more likely to see one of the notifications on my screen even before I noticed the changes on the keyboard.
You also do not have much choice when viewing or deleting signal notifications: either one at a time, or all of them. You can not get rid of those of a single application, so I ended up with a stack of notifications from Engadget's Twitter account and all the rest lost in the stack. It defeats a lot of the keyboard point for me. I can see the space bar blinking to let me know that I have a Trello card, but I can not easily find the notification in the list when it is buried under a bunch of Twitter, Twitch and Tumblr messages . My best option at this point is to open Trello himself and find the map all by myself.
Das Keyboard is not the first manufacturer to make notifications on a keyboard: SteelSeries Engine applications allow game-specific notifications as well as Discord integration. And Logitech has a fairly robust programming suite that allows even complex animations. It is therefore possible to configure different alerts on their devices. But they are not as user friendly as the q-Desktop. Plus, if you buy the 5Q and the X50Q, it's precisely because they're made by Das Keyboard, which makes damn good the keyboards. And when it comes to creating quality, I can not blame these new decks.
The standard 5Q, without play, is heavy for a general keyboard. No surprise when the top deck is metal – at 3.2 pounds, it rivals the weight of many of its competitors, including the recent models I've tested with companies like Razer and Roccat. The action of the keys "Gamma Zulu Soft Touch" is soft with noise that does not distract too much, and the dial at the top right is an absolute pleasure to handle. It gently clicks when you turn it as a volume control and you can even push it to open or refresh the signal center, but unfortunately, it's the extent of its powers: you can not assign him signal.
The media keys are less thrilling, they are small wafer shaped buttons about 2 millimeters high that look cheap and fragile. The quality of the other keys is a little better, but the letters and numbers are difficult to read thanks to the texture and the choice of fonts. This is not a big deal if you are half decent at typing, but trying to find the sign of the pound and the ampersand at a glance is a headache.
The 5Q would be the heavier keyboard in my collection of playback units, if not the X50Q, a gaming console that also uses q-Desktop technology. Software side, there is no difference between the two. They share the same layout, up to the multimedia buttons in the corner. All the signals you set up for the 5Q also work on the X50Q, but only on one device at a time.
The X50Q weighs 3.41 kg and its metal alloy is no longer present on your face, with angled edges and eight rivets framing the sides that could allow you to remove the top plate, but let's be honest: they're really here to have the Look cool. The keys are a bit crisper than those of the 5Q, but underneath they are still the same Gamma Zulu switches. He uses the same font, but in bold. This combination with a matte texture on the surface of the key facilitates the reading of the symbols. The multimedia buttons on the X50Q are real keys, which is a huge improvement, but the button has been downgraded to a narrow button.
While the builds are mostly high-end, q-Desktop and the signals still leave much to be desired. Das Keyboard has promised features such as multi-key animations, colored streaks that run through sections of your keyboard depending on weather conditions or stock market fluctuations. But these applets and the ability to schedule them will only be available later this month. The documentation provided by the online business has not been of much help either.
The q-Desktop has a certain problem of chicken and egg: it is not really worth it to be bought, because the ecosystem of the applet is small, but this ecosystem does not will grow only when users will use it. At the moment, the 5Q and the X50Q are keyboards for those who like to tinker and experiment. Anyone wishing to have a suite of easily customizable and expansive notifications at their fingertips can be better placed.
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