I get a lot of use out of keyboards. All PC gamers do, of course, but I’m a little lucky in the sense that I spend a huge chunk of my days sitting at one writing about games and sending emails about them, and then in my spare time one of my favourite hobbies happens to be music editing, and when booting up Cubase or Logic the keyboard shortcuts are a vital part of creating anything half decent and worth listening to.
That’s a good criterion to look at the quality of any keyboard, and that’s the criteria in which I’m going to be reviewing the Eclipse Wireless Litetouch Keyboard from Mad Catz, their latest keyboard designed with the office and gaming in mind in equal measure.
The main keyboard section on the Litetouch is pretty standard, sporting the regular key layout for a full-size keyboard with comfortable keys that punch down smoothly but in silence, ensuring late-night or frantic typing doesn’t bother others in the vicinity.
The typing experience on the normal keys is satisfying and comfortable, and the backlight on the keys is bright and vibrant. Best of all, the brightness of the backlight on the keyboard is entirely user adjustable via the keyboard itself, meaning if you want to lower the glare or save battery you can, and there’s no need to boot up software to change the brightness settings.
The big difference on the Litetouch and the thing that makes it a flagship item in the PC peripheral line-up from Mad Catz comes in the form of its LCD touch screen, which replaces the numpad on the right side of the keyboard. The display of touch screen is beautiful, crisp and clear, and while it’s only white on a black background all the icons and options are clear and easy to understand.
By default the touch screen displays the numpad that would be there on a regular keyboard as well as the brightness, volume and battery charge icons, but there’s three buttons at the top that let you flick between three different ‘pages’ on the touch screen.
One page belongs to the number pad, which is handy for the calculator, while the next page on is dedicated to Media - from here you can manage music and media players as well as launch into the preset Windows media folders for Videos, Pictures and Music. It also features shortcuts to a few vital items like the calculator and the main “Computer” folder.
This is all pretty standard stuff, but the third page titled “My Eclipse” is where things get serious. This gives you a set of keys that can then be mapped via software to pretty much anything you like. They could house macros for gaming, or shortcuts to programs you always use.
You’re given numbered buttons from 1 through 5, and then a bunch of icons that could be associated with various things the average user could use. One icon is clearly for a media player, and another for networking, while I immediately linked the Game Controller icon to launching Steam. Others, like a tennis racket and two drama ‘masks’ were a bit stranger in their appearance, but they can still be mapped to anything you like on your system.
It’s a shame that the iconography on the MyEclipse area can’t be changed, but I suppose that’s a reasonable limit of the touch screen, especially considering the full and comprehensive options you get to edit the function of those buttons. Once the functions are set the keyboard does a great job of doing whatever you’ve asked it to do in the config program.
The config program installed fine on my Windows 7 rig, though I did have a bit of trouble getting it to actually boot the first time I used it. The software interface is easy to use, and actually allows you to drag and drop the programs you want to use directly on to each button rather than select stuff manually. It’s easy to use, but it’s not the prettiest configuration tool in the world.
Everything about the touch screen so far has been brilliant, but sadly in terms of actual day-to-day use, it’s not all that handy. The lack of tactile feedback makes it pretty poor as a NumPad, but worse than that is the general performance of the LCD pad. I’d often find inputs on the LCD screen repeated two or even three times, and switching between the three different ‘screens’ on the LCD touch screen was inconsistent, sometimes instant and sometimes suffering from lag while it loaded the next page.
While the LCD touch screen is somewhat lacking, the good news is that the physical keys are comfortably spaced, quiet and generally up there with some of the best-designed keyboards I’ve ever used. There’s also a trackball mouse complete with left and right mouse buttons which functions well, should you want to eliminate the need for a mouse entirely.
The battery life was more than satisfactory for me even with my obsession with having the backlight cranked all the way up, and the keyboard comes packed with both a mains and USB charger cable. Something has to be said for the keyboard’s battery-saving methods, too - left idle for a while it dims the backlight accordingly, and then eventually turns the keyboard completely off until you return, which is handy for people like me who forget to turn things off.
Sadly, the main draw of this keyboard isn’t actually the best thing about it. The LCD touch screen is a solid concept, but the execution here leaves something to be desired. Outside of that, though, Mad Catz has delivered a high quality keyboard that’s silent, comfortable and light with lag-free wireless and a fairly decent battery life which gets even better with the backlight turned down.
While I’d find the Eclipse Litetouch hard to recommend if all you wanted it for was the LCD touch screen, but if you want a decent keyboard in general with some fun but temperamental customization features, this is definitely worth a shout.
Score: 6.5/10
