среда, 31 декабря 2014 г.

Logitech K310 Keyboard - 100 Percent Washable, 98 Percent Amazing

This is one hundred percent insane. Red Dot design award went to Samsonite for Inova suitcases which are... well, plain boring suitcases with plain boring zip locks and... WOW!!! hard and durable plastic body.

Curious to see how they look like after several dozen trips and how using such suitcase changes its owner's life for the better and especially whether the change is worth the overwhelming sticker price of the suitcase. Seriously, does anyone have any case studies or success stories about that?

Meanwhile on the bright side of the planet... Why didn't Logitech nominate its K310 keyboard which is just two steps from being absolutely amazing?

K310 is neat, thin, lightweight, strong, durable (as any other Logitech keyboard for the record) and you can wash it under water tap.

Dust between keys? Tiny food particles between keys? Fibers from office paper towels between keys? You don't have to clean this keyboard with compressed air or the like - you just unplug it and wash it under the water tap. Then you let it dry for several hours and your keyboard is almost new.

It's "almost" because water leaves occasional light gray stains on the dark gray plastic when it dries - same as stains from raindrops on a dark car body. This is what happens when dark colored stuff gets wet and then dries. Too bad dark gray is the only choice of color with this keyboard.

There's just one thing which is really uncool with this keyboard - the space between the groups of keys (between the letters and the up-down-left-right block and between the latter block and the numbers block) is just a bit narrower than it was on Deluxe 360 model. Why would this design change be necessary? Saving a gram of plastic at the expense of user frustration? Was the focus group formed of typists who never use a computer or what? The bright side is that a human can adapt to almost any piece of design crap and especially so when the piece is not very large.

So after a week or so of frustration and hitting the wrong keys you have good chances to either violently break it into pieces or accept it and enjoy the fact that you can wash it as easily as you wash your jeans and cookware.

It is a much larger improvement than it looks like. Totally should have been nominated for Red Dot Award. Perhaps Logitech will do this once it masters a more practical color for the keyboard body and stops saving plastic where a tiny saving notably worsens user experience.