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Ideazon Zboard

Written by Gotti on Tuesday, November 15 2005

The guys over at Ideazon were kind enough to send us a Zboard so we could check it out and give our readers a look at one of the most popular new and innovative gaming keyboards to ever hit the market. To start off I will state that for the last decade I have been 100% a mouse and keyboard gamer so I was really looking forward to seeing if there would be any significant differences in gameplay.

First off the basics, as you can see from the pictures this is a nice looking keyboard that comes with a standard keyset and a FPS gaming keyset (there are also other options for RPG games and custom keyboards on the Zboard website). There are a lot of nice extra shortcut keys added on the top of the keyboard to control media, msn, e-mail, etc. The only real complaint I could say about the standard keyboard is that it may not be as comfortable as some other keyboards I've used (not to say that its uncomfortable, just not AS comfortable). On to the gaming keyset now.

One thing that I was quite impressed with was the easy and quickness in which the keysets can be changed out. After one or two run-throughs of how the keyset actually sits into the base, it takes no longer than 10 seconds to switch between keysets. I also liked the ease at which you could connect to the Ideazon website to download pre-programmed in keys for specific games (there are constantly updating the list so you should have no problem finding the popular games) So how did the gaming keyset actually measure up while I played some of my favorite FPS games? (I tried out Half-Life 2 and Bet on Soldier mainly for testing this keyboard) It was quite nice. The first few minutes were a little awkward, but that was likely due to the fact that I wasn't used to these keys. Once I got playing for awhile I found that it was much nicer in subtle ways. The large red movement keys were very nice and made the slightly more complicated movements (i.e. crouching while strafing and shooting) a bit easier on the fingers and wrist. It was also nice to have multiple keys so close together and easy to reach (i.e. the reload, use, etc). I also found the pause key to be quite handy at times. The only complaint that one could make about the gaming keyset in my mind is that you can't use it as a regular keyset (unless you train yourself to use a different keyboard setup). But like i said earlier, it takes all of 10 seconds to switch back to the regular keyset so this isn't really much of an issue.

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