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Monday, September 23, 2019

Review Keychron K2 Bluetooth Keyboard

I ordered the Keychron K2 Bluetooth Keyboard as a kickstarter project for a couple of reasons:

  1. I wanted a wireless keyboard, and the K2 advertised itself as being pairable with up to 3 computers, so you could pair it with desktop, personal laptop, and say, work computer.
  2. My wife kept complaining about how loud the Varmilo VA87M was. The keyboard had a great feel, so I knew I wanted another mechanical keyboard.
With kickstarter, you never know when or if the keyboard would ever show up, but I figured since Keychron had actual products on Amazon, including the K1, I figured it wasn't too much of a risk. I didn't look too carefully at the layout of the original K1 vs the K2, or I might have decided that the extra thinness of the K1 was worth it in exchange for better layout.

When the keyboard arrived, I was impressed by how compact and quiet it was given that it had all the arrow keys and the "home" and "end" buttons. What was missing is the "insert" button, which I do miss once in a while. The keyboard came with a keypuller and extra keycaps in case it bothered you to have the device keys look like a Mac keyboard instead of a real Windows keyboard. Since I mostly use windows on my home systems I switched out the keycaps.

Pairing is quick and easy: hold down Fn and one of either '1', '2', or '3', depending on which slot you want to pair with. The device paired easily, and had a neat little feature, which is that as you type, the keys you're typing on light up and then fade slowly away. Very cool! It's a frivolous feature but it really tickled me.

The problem with bluetooth keyboards of course is that they're not as responsive or as low latency as a real keyboard hooked up to the machine. Fortunately, the device comes with a USB slot that you can plug in to either charge the keyboard or to get a real time response when plugged in instead. When plugged in, I expect that the latency and response time will be just as good as a real wired keyboard.

The bluetooth stacks on computers, phones and keyboards all suck: after a long time in disconnected state, the keyboard will no longer re-connect with my desktop. I can't tell whether it's the cheap CSR dongle that I got off Amazon for $6.70, or this keyboard. I suspect a more modern bluetooth 5.0 dongle with better firmware (I since tested the keyboard against a MacBook Pro, and indeed both the pairing/resumption from sleep functions work much better, so I guess I should bite the bullet and buy a higher quality BT dongle!) will work better, but since re-pairing the keyboard is easy, I just live with it. (I have a Logitech Brio so I can login even without the keyboard)

The keyboard has a very nice typing feel. It's a little software than the Varmilo, but still much better than the crappy chiclet/island-style keyboards that come with more modern computers, and I can maintain a high typing speed on it without errors, provided the bluetooth latency isn't a problem.

To my surprise, the keyboard battery ran low after just about 4 weeks of use. Then I realized that I'd inadvertently left the keyboard's lighting mode on. I suspect that keeping the keyboard's backlight off would grant you better battery life. In any case, the keyboard is only rated for 15 hours of use, which indicates that bluetooth is a much more power expensive protocol than whatever it is that Logitech's unifying technology uses.

All in all, for the price it's a great keyboard. If you need a bluetooth keyboard that can also be a wired keyboard, this is the only one that'll take USB-C, so you don't currently have a lot of other choices! That it's fairly cheap makes it unique in its class. Recommended.

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