14 DAY TRIAL // “Visually appealing” isn't a phrase all that hard to misunderstand, but the latest product from Adesso will go a long way to show that what someone considers “visually appealing” could be seen as anything but by others.
The product in question is the 132 Luminous 4X Large Print Desktop Keyboard, and may be the peripheral with the sharpest color contrast ever.
After all, deep black and bright yellow aren't hues you'd expect to find next to each other, at least not by design.
That's exactly what Adesso did though: colored the keyboard body black and coated all the keys in a bright yellow paint. We suppose it could be considered borderline gold, but it's debatable.
We're not sure if having such a blatant color theme will do more good than harm. It's one thing to have a backlight softly shining from behind the keys, and another for the keys themselves to stand out too much.
Then again, it's not like Adesso is aiming for regular customers. The ones that stand to gain most from purchasing the peripheral are those who don't have the sharpest eyes anymore.
Adesso says, in its announcement, that it colored the keys in that bright yellow because it wanted them to be easily read, to prevent mistypes. The large 4X size black print helps there.
The larger font and visible color difference will let such customers type their own documents, e-mails and whatever else even if they have slight visual impairments.
Not sure how this will factor into the picture for people who don't even look at the keyboard while writing a document, but there it is.
At least the capabilities of the newcomer are more than decent, starting with the 14 hotkeys that grant access to the Internet and multimedia functions.
To be more specific, there are 104 keys in total, but of those 14, eight are dedicated to media (Media Player, Volume Down, Volume Up, Mute, Play/Pause, Previous, Next, Stop) and 6 to PC and web function control (My Computer, Search, Calculator, Mail, Home, Favorites).
There aren't any mechanical switches here, since this isn't a gaming peripheral, but the membrane should do just fine, and last for up to five million key strokes.
All in all, the Adesso AKB-132UY keyboard measures 17.7 x 6.6 x 0.8 inches / 450 x 167 x 21.4 mm and runs on power provided by a USB 2.0 cable. It has a price of $19.99 / €19.99 and you'll find it through most retailers soon, if it hasn't been listed already.