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Saturday, January 17, 2009

The Logitech Wave

Well, I've had my Logitech Wave keyboard for a while now and I suppose I owe you a review. So without any further ado, here we go.

I haven't spent too much time with the Wave since I bought it, but the time I have spent with it has been pretty good. The keys have really good feedback and aside from the weirdo layout for the "6-pack" I haven't had too much trouble adapting to it.

One of the things I really wanted in a keyboard was a scroll wheel. Unfortunately this one doesn't have that feature, but neither do any of the other ones I've seen. What it does have, which is fairly common is a zoom control. On the Mac the zoom control can be reconfigured to act as a scroll wheel. I was a little skeptical at first about how well it would work but I was pleasantly surprised.

Windows however is a completely different story. In order to treat the zoom control as a scroll wheel I had to install modifications to the drivers called uberOptions. It certainly gets the job done but not without its own problem. The software had some weird quirk where it would hold on to the mouse cursor position and restore it when you stop scrolling. It was really frustrating because I tend to like to use the mouse at the same time as scrolling, i.e. scroll on a page and click links, but this software just kept jumping the cursor back. Argh! I really don't like having to install extra software to get what seems like some trivial functionality, but if it actually worked I probably wouldn't complain. The fact that it doesn't work as I would expect it just frustrating.

Since my use of the zoom control is slightly esoteric, I wouldn't hesitate recommending the Logitech Wave to anyone looking for a new keyboard. But if you're looking for a keyboard with a scroll feature and are running Windows, stick with what you've got, or wait for the software to get an upgrade.