There are plenty of Bluetooth keyboards out on the market. When 1byone asked us to take a look at their Bluetooth keyboard, I wasn’t expecting all that much. I figured it’d be a cheap-feeling hunk of plastic that I could type with and not much more. I should have probably known by now, but I ended up with quite the pleasant surprise.

First Impressions

The bluetooth keyboard is a full size keyboard, which is something I haven’t had the pleasure of finding in many quality Bluetooth keyboards in the past. On top of this, the keyboard has quite a few useful functions tied to the F1-F12 keys and they worked on both Android and Windows operating systems. The track pad seemed to function without any issue and actually worked well of the Ouya and the PC Stick that I had access to, showing a ton of versatility.

Probably my favorite thing about this Bluetooth keyboard was the fact that the entire back of it was solid aluminum. Not only did it look nice, but it added a significant amount of weight to the keyboard, which made it both feel like it wasn’t going to fly off my lap and also survive a real amount of usage. The Chiclet-style keys felt very responsive and were just the right type of noisy that you know you are hitting the keys without having to actually check while you are writing.

Setting it up was quick and easy, as a Bluetooth device should be and the response when typing was almost instant. This boded quite well and there were only a few minor draws to the keyboard in general. For someone who has multiple Bluetooth devices in the house, I was expecting it to jump to an active pairing whenever available. Instead, if I wanted to jump from one device to another, I had to manually go in and reconnect it. I’m not sure if it was just the tablet, PC Stick and Ouya that the issue was on, but with 3 items doing the same thing, it seemed like a little inconvenience to work the way I wanted it to. I was also actually a little surprised that the Windows swipe controls were a little unwieldy. I could possibly suck at using them, but after even following the directions, it seemed to want to do its own thing.