Touchstream LP Keyboard Review

When I first saw the Touchstream LP keyboard in my daily Internet trawling my interest was peeked. I have always been interested in different methods of user input. Although the Touchstream is still a keyboard what seperates it from the rest are its gesture abilities.

My first impressions of the keyboard included comments like, wow, amazing, sweeeeet, huh, damn and crap. The mixed reaction was because the Touchstream is very different from other keyboards. Unlike other keyboards the Touchstream provides zero tactile feedback due to the use of two very large touchpads for the keyboard (like the ones found on laptops). This means that you have no feedback so if you slightly miss a key on the keyboard there is no tactile feedback to correct yourself. Therefore when I first started to use the keyboard I kept on typing the wrong letters, which was very frustrating. The keyboard itself tries to help by using a built-in dictionary and guesses what you are typing and tries to correct. Overall this works fairly well but you will still need to relearn how to use keyboard. As I can already touchtype the learning process for the keyboard did not take too long but was still a painful process.

What makes the re-learning process all worth it are the gestures that the keyboard provides. The two large touchpads are capable of registering multiple touch points to allow for quite complex gestures. Depending on how many figures and the motions used on these touch pads and arrary of different gestures can be performed. For a complete list of gestures possible visit the Touchstream website. Using gestures you are able to open applications, cut, copy, paste, switch applications. If you do not like the standard gestures the keyboard comes with a java utility to remap the gestures to whatever you would like.

Another great feature are the multiple modes that the keyboard can be set to. The most interesting mode is the gaming mode that changes the keyboards operation to allow its use in games. You can also customise the gestures so that they can be used within the game. Have you ever wanted to reload by just expanding your fingers well the Touchstream allows for this and many other customisable gestures.

If you are like me and use both mac and pc then you will be happy to hear that the Touchstream works on both systems the same. As some settings are actually stored in the keyboard there are a few problems when moving the keyboard back and forth between the mac and pc systems but I did not find this to be much of a problem. I actually found that the support for the mac was more integrated than PC.

Overall the Touchstream is a great piece of kit although most users will find the lack of feedback and need to learn how to use it annoying. I would only recommend the Touchstream to users who use computers all the time and will therefore spend the time to learn how to use the keyboard.

Rating: 8/10