The installation is quite simple. The keyboard comes with a USB RF receiver (“antenna”) that must be installed on any free USB port from your computer or video game console. Unfortunately this unit is not Bluetooth.
click to enlarge
Figure 9: USB receiver.
There is no need to install any kind of software to have this keyboard working: Windows XP and Vista recognizes all its functions automatically. What is great about this keyboard is that video game consoles also recognize it without any extra configuration. We installed it on a Playstation 3 and both the keyboard and the trackball worked just fine.
The thing we liked the most about this keyboard is that the “mouse” (in this case, trackball) buttons are located on the opposite side as the trackball. One thing that drives us nuts when using laptop-like keyboards is that we touch the mouse buttons by mistake several times. This simply doesn’t happen with this model. Another great advantage of this layout is that you can hold the keyboard with both hands and operate the trackball with your right thumb and the buttons with your left thumb, making the operation of the trackball far easier.
The dpi adjustment available is really nice, and should please all kinds of users. For us at 400 dpi the cursor moved too slowly on the screen whereas at 1200 dpi the cursor moved too fast. So for normal use we set it at 800 dpi. Depending on your screen resolution you may want to set it to a different number.
Even though it looks like a laptop keyboard, the keys are very firm and precise and you can clearly feel when the key was correctly pressed, plus the keyboard makes the traditional clicking noise when operated. We personally like when we can hear and feel the keys being pressed. Some laptop-like keyboards don’t have these features, making us to spend some time looking on the screen to see if the keys we wanted where correctly pressed, slowing down our typing speed and create too many typos.
We could operate it from up to 28 feet (8.5 m), which far more than anyone needs. It probably has a range higher than that but we couldn’t test it because this was the maximum we could go inside our office!
In summary, Enermax Aurora Micro Wireless is a good keyboard.
