Genius LuxeMate Scroll Keyboard

This offering from Genius is a stylish and slim keyboard which comes with a range of decent hotkeys and, as the name suggests, a built-in scroll wheel. All these extras may be in vogue, though the LuxeMate Scroll doesn't have all that many more or less special features in comparison to the other keyboards we've reviewed here.

The keyboard is of a slim and stylish design, though it's sturdier than it may first appear (as was proven when I inadvertently hopped it off my desk whilst setting it up. The keyboard itself is of the soft touch variety, and banging on it is as pleasant an experience as one can hope for in such matters. There is an overhanging wrist-rest at the base of the keyboard which, depending on how you feel about such things, can either be an annoyance or a relief.

Being made of hard plastic rather than any soft gel we didn't really see the point in the overhang, as usually without one we'd just rest the base of the palm of our hands on the desk whilst not typing.

The hotkeys are located to the sides of the keyboard, rather than along the top which is more usually the case. This can actually make them easier to reach, as you can simply slide either one of your hands across to press the button rather than having to lift it up (a more arduous task, in our lazy opinion.)

The keys on offer include the obligatory My Computer, email client and internet browser keys on the left, along with forward/back keys, and on the right hand side there is the sleep button, a shortcut to the calculator (a nice touch, we thought); and a button for opening your media player, along with keys to control it and the volume.

The scroll wheel, for which the keyboard was named in the first place, is a bit of an extraneous oddity. Considering that most mice these days come with scroll wheels the one on the Genius keyboard might be considered a bit redundant in the first place. It is also difficult to reach and in an uncomfortable location at the top left of the keyboard, so it's a pain to use whether you have a mouse-scroll wheel or not.

Genius touts the spacing of keys on this board, though we don't know why, as they are a little tightly spaced together, there being little or no gap between the numpad and the rest of the board. This didn't present too much of a problem whilst typing though, and the Scroll provided some of the least typos even whilst still trying to get used to its layout.

One of the more niggling problems with the Scroll is its "Advanced stand", which is so advanced it would seem that one might need a few NASA engineers around to open the bloody thing up. For those of us who don't like having our keyboards flat it can be annoying having to spend five or ten minutes trying to figure out how the stand works.

It's just one of those things we're afraid - you'll either get it intuitively first go, or else you'll spend a half an hour trying to figure out how the stand works. Unfortunately for us we fell into the latter category.

The keyboard comes in both PS/2 and USB varieties.