How many nights have you sat in a darkened room either working or, more likely, playing and you've found yourself struggling to find the keys for gaming, IM or forum posting? Given the widespread availability of LED lights and USB to power them we were only surprised that it is taking a long while for back-lit keyboards to come into fashion.

Their appeal is obvious, and it's not all that hard to pull off - fairly translucent keys, soft LED light and USB connection. This offering from Speed-Link is a stylish metal offering which touts its soft-touch, lightweight laptop-like feel alongside its more traditional keyboard size and layout.

As well as the back-light the keyboard comes with a raft of internet, multimedia and computer control hotkeys populating the top of the keyboard.

The keyboard looks and feels like something you'd be proud to have on your desk, and its sleek, stylish lines make it worth having for the show-off value alone. When typing it does feel like a laptop keyboard which is a plus if, like us, you happen to prefer laptop keyboards to their chunkier desktop companions.

The major problem which we have with the illuminated metal keyboard is that the spacebar has a tendency not to fire when it has been hit. This is because there are, we can see from the translucent keys as handily back lit for us, only three sensors in the rather elongated key. This means that if you hit it in the wrong part or with the wrong amount of pressure (say whilst typing like a lunatic technology journalist) it has a tendency not to register, which is damn annoying.

This means that you have to be extra careful as to where you place your finger on the keyboard, not something we're prone to doing whilst typing fast. With some getting used to you'll be flying, but it puts us off using the keyboard in our typing intensive world. Being USB powered though we've come into the habit of switching out the illuminated keyboard for our normal darkened one when the hour grows late and we can put up with the typos caused by a misfiring spacebar. Compared, at least, to the typos caused by not being able to see the keyboard at all.

Thus the keyboard is something of a luxury rather than something we use on a daily basis, and so it's only really worth the purchase if you happen to be making a habit of hitting the wrong keys at night.

Again being from Speed-Link the keyboard has a German layout, though once your computer is set up for an English keyboard it'll type like one.