Tech Reaction

With HTPC’s becoming more and more popular these days, who wants to be tied down to the desk just to use their keyboard? The Eclipse Wireless litetouch (small L) keyboard was designed with this exact scenario in mind. With it’s wireless USB connection and up to a 30ft range, you can recline in your favorite chair across the room and still control your HTPC. Whether you run an HTPC in your living room or just want the wireless freedom at your desk, this keyboard will provide that. In addition to the wireless technology, the litetouch (as the name would imply) contains a touchscreen display. We will definitely put the touch screen LCD through the paces and see if this feature is actually all that it is cracked up to be. How responsive is it? How well does it actually pick up on what you are trying to select? Let’s see how it does, shall we?

Packaging:

The MadCatz Eclipse:

Features:

Installing and Setting up:

Once you charge up the keyboard and get it all setup, you can install the software that comes with it. You will see the screen above when it first starts up. Every key in the “My Eclipse” and “Media Controls” sections are fully programmable. That is 35 keys that can have one program or multiple programs assigned to them, leaving you with plenty of options for your custom keys.

Once you are ready to start assigning keys, you have three options. You can select your program from the application “drop down” list (left) and it will put the program with the key you have selected for it to go to. The second option is to browse (right) for what you would like to add to the selected key. The third option is for web browsing, and for that you can just type in the link of the website you would like your browser to open in the box.

Once you have setup all your buttons, you can easily test them to make sure they work the way you programmed them. Just click the “Test” button and the screen above will appear. From here, you can push all your programmed keys to make sure they are working as intended.

Usage:

In the two screen shots above, you can see how we programmed our buttons. For number 3 in our “My Eclipse” section, we started out having it set to our website. Then we started experimenting with it and found out that you can have multiple things set to one key. We went ahead and typed in two other websites (right) as you can see here. Now when we hit the number 3 on our touchscreen, it will pop-up our browser with all three websites in their own tabs. This is a really cool feature which certainly adds an extra level of convenience to the entire device.

With the pictures above, you can see the three options of the 3-in-1 LCD touch panel: My Eclipse, number pad, and media controls. You can adjust the brightness of your keyboard and LCD screen by touching the icon in the top right that looks like a sun. The volume bar is always the option available until you hit the brightness icon. To the right of the volume bar you will find the battery level and the wireless connection status. As for the touchscreen itself, it is very responsive and easy to use. It picks up on what button you are touching really well, and you don’t have to press it over and over to get the right one. When using the number pad, you can’t fly over the keys like a normal keyboard or calculator, you will have to slow down a little. However, as long as you hit the buttons at a reasonable pace, you will be good to go.

Size Comparison:

For the size comparison, we chose the Logitech G-15 since it was sitting around our office. As you can see, the slim profile of the litetouch is quite noticeable when compared to our G-15. This is good news for the people looking for a smaller, more portable keyboard for their HTPC. This is also good if you are simply wanting one for your desk that takes up less space.

Charging / Power Saving:

Charging is very simple with the litetouch keyboard. Arguably one of the best features is that there are no batteries required, which is amazing! We have never liked the idea of going to the store and buying a 50-pack of AA’s just to get through a couple of long weeks of work. With this keyboard, MadCatz opted to use a rechargeable pack, all you need is a wall outlet or a computer with USB connection to charge it. This is a nice addition to the keyboard and it makes it easier on the user, not too mention less expensive in the long run. To help conserve the battery, the litetouch also has an automatic dimmer and sleep timers for the display, so there is no need to worry about it being on all the time and draining the battery. Once inactive for about 2 minutes, it will dim the lights to help save power. Then, after another minute or two, it will go into “sleep mode” to conserve even more power. To get it out of either mode, all you need to do is hit any key and you are back in action.

Precision Trackball:

The precision trackball is put in a nice position on the keyboard, out of the way from normal typing. However, this is one of the few positive things about it. The trackball works well and the buttons click correctly, after that, it goes down hill. For normal computer use, this combination would drive you nuts. It drove us nuts typing this article on this keyboard because of having to navigate so many keys.  The way the buttons and trackball are positioned make it very uncomfortable to scroll and click at the same time. You can either do one or the other, but doing both is rough. The trackball should be above the two buttons to help give it a more natural feel and make it a lot easier to use.

Some of you may be worried that you will hit the touchscreen while trying to play with the mouse. Good news, the litetouch comes with a “lock” key that will lock the LCD screen so that it cannot be accessed. This is a very smart idea considering your fingers go all over the touchscreen while working the trackball.

Conclusion:

The Eclipse wireless litetouch keyboard was overall very impressive and rich is feature. The “Trueview” back-lighting is a nice addition to a keyboard and helps make it stand out from other standard keyboards. The slim design of the device really makes this a multi-purpose keyboard. The low profile keys will take a little bit of getting used to coming from a larger keyboard with more height to it, as everything is a little closer together. At the start of the article, there was quite a bit of backspacing, but now the words are flowing like normal.

The one major gripe we have with the keyboard is the awful trackball setup. It really makes it hard to use in a normal computer situation with it’s current placement. We simply could not see using the trackball for mouse intensive work. However, if you just needed to select a movie, or something along those lines, from your HTPC then it would certainly be do-able. Keep this in mind if you decide to purchase this keyboard, because you may be going right back to the store to pick up another mouse.

The 3-in-1 LCD screen is a great feature for the keyboard and it definitely stands out among other keyboards on the market with its touchscreen and programmable 30+ keys. If you look at this as a keyboard only, then we would not hesitate to recommend this as a great wireless keyboard. If you are looking for a wireless keyboard-mouse combo, we would not be so willing to recommend it, unless you were not doing any mouse-heavy activities. The trackball just ruins it for us with the unnatural feel from the way you have to use it. Maybe a new revision of the litetouch will adjust the layout to resolve this issue.



The Eclipse litetouch wireless keyboard receives the TechREACTION.net Silver Silicon Award!

You can find more information of the Eclipse litetouch wireless keyboard here, and you can purchase the litetouch at Performance-PCs.