Gear

Steel Series Shift Fully Customizes Your Gaming Keyboard

Let’s suppose you’re a hard-core PC gamer, but 1) you’re equally devoted to a LOT of different games, or 2) you don’t want your keyboard to ALWAYS look like you’re battling the Lich King. Like if a girl comes over. You need a chameleon keyboard, ready to do (and look like) whatever you need it […]

Let's suppose you're a hard-core PC gamer, but 1) you're equally devoted to a LOT of different games, or 2) you don't want your keyboard to ALWAYS look like you're battling the Lich King. Like if a girl comes over. You need a chameleon keyboard, ready to do (and look like) whatever you need it to.

SteelSeries makes keyboards for gamers that do this, with custom keysets for World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Aion. The hardware lets you swap the entire keyset for different games; the software lets you map every key, record macros on-the-fly, and switch between different custom key layers. The first iteration was the ZBoard; the new Shift model boasts revamped hardware and a more powerful and intuitive software engine.

I have to confess that I'm probably not the target market for these keysets – as a writer, I have to do a lot of typing in a hurry, but it's generally not purely reacting by instinct – but I'm obsessed with keyboards, both physical and software, and I do love some of the concepts on display here. For instance, the Shift offers "Fine-Tuned Hot Spots":

Some keys are used more frequently than others, both when gaming and typing. The keys you use the most, like WASD for First Person Shooters, require less force than the keys you don’t use as often.

I think my laptop's spacebar could actually use the opposite of that, to stand up to my thundrous thumbs. The delete key, too, as I angrily backspace through typos or (even more often) self-inflected stupidity. Maybe they need "journalist" and "fanboy" key sets for the web – the latter could have built-in macros for "You're too dumb to understand why [Company X] sucks and [Company Y] is the future of [industry Z]."

In the gallery below, check out how the SteelSeries Shift works, with close-ups of the different branded keysets available from SteelSeries (The image quality on the keysets is frankly not great).

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steelseries-shift-standard-keyset
SteelSeries Shift with Standard Keyset.

SteelSeries Shift: The Swiss Army Knife of Keyboards [Techland]

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