Wireless is wonderful for, say, your gaming mouse, headset, and controller but less so for your keyboard. Between managing input latency and battery life, a wireless keyboard would have to be something pretty special to win me over. Well, Cherry is trying their chances with what is likely the world’s first Ultra-Wideband gaming keyboard.
Revealed during Computex, the Cherry XTRFY K63W Pro Compact is a 70% wireless gaming keyboard. The favoured 2.4 GHz connection of many wireless PC peripherals can make for a cluttered band of the radio spectrum, potentially leading to connection issues between your devices. The K63W Pro Compact’s Ultra-Wideband connection attempts to sidestep all of that.
That said, I can’t say I’ve personally fallen afoul of a cluttered 2.4 GHz frequency at my own setup, and I suspect this Ultra-Wideband functionality may have niche appeal. We’ve seen the wireless tech predominantly in 8 kHz gaming mice before this, such as the still unreleased Steelseries Rival Pro Mini. The wireless tech affords the same high polling rate on the Cherry XTRFY K63W Pro Compact too, but again, that seems like overkill to me.
It’s also worth noting that an Ultra-Wideband connection lacks the same long range as a 2.4 GHz link. That’s fine for deskbound peripherals like mice and keyboards, but potentially less great news if you love to lounge and operate your PC at a distance.
On the subject of ‘overkill’, though, the Cherry XTRFY K63W Pro Compact also enjoys a 6000 mAh battery that the company claims could potentially last you up to 1,100 hours (obviously, hours of heavy use with the RGB at max brightness and the polling rate set to the 8k maximum will whittle that figure down a bit). Such a generous battery certainly draws my sceptical eye.
This board also enjoys Cherry’s MX Low Profile 2.0 switches. I’m personally not a fan of keys that are on the shallower side, but reducing the distance between you and your keys’ actuation point by even mere millimetres is bound to appeal to the esports fiends.
Cherry also touts the XTRFY K63W Pro Compact’s “carefully tuned gasket construction” which, combined with those low-profile switches, apparently makes for “softer keystrokes, deeper acoustics, and a more satisfying typing experience in a slim form factor.” The Cherry XTRFY K63W Pro Compact is slated for release in the US this August and will retail for $170. If you’re based in the EU, you can pick it up from July for €180.
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