Poker II thoughts

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Man, the Poker II keyboard is tiny!

Definitely like the idea around it, having a keyboard the size of the letterblock on most keyboards that has most of the capabilities of my tenkeyless CM Storm Quickfire Rapid keyboard in the background is really cool. You can access keys like the function row and the cursor keys by holding down the Fn key, and it does have volume keys as well as Home, End, PageUp/Down, Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause.

Not sure how I feel about the Cherry MX Blue switches yet. Maybe I just have to get used to them and how they feel, but so far I think I like Brown switches better, they’re just smoother. Blues sound a lot cooler though, they’re clicky, so when you type it’s clicky-clack, instead of clack-clack. Very nice.

Also, with the cursor keys set to WASD, it’s actually a bit more convenient to use them on the Poker II if you like to stick to your home row, because you can assign the left Winkey as a Fn key, so you can easily hold down the Fn key with your pinky finger while using your other three fingers on the cursor keys.

Using both of these keyboards has made me realize I need to learn how to type again. I tend to type with my two index fingers and my thumb, and while I have a decent WPM with that method and can type blind, I think I could type a bit faster and more efficiently if I learned how to use all five of my fingers on each hand again. I used to be able to do it quite well blindly, but over time I got lazy and went back to two fingers.

Anyway, the Poker II is a great keyboard, and I definitely have a mechanical keyboard addiction now that I have two of them. I think I’m going to keep using my Quickfire Rapid as my main keyboard and mod my Poker II with some custom keycaps and maybe a metal body. The current keycaps are fine but I got the backlit version of the Poker, and the current keycaps don’t let the light shine through, so I want to get some that look nice but have illuminated letters. But these zinc keycaps on Massdrop are tempting:

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But maybe they’re a bit too gaudy. And they don’t have transparent letters. Shiny…

I digress. The Poker II is great, but I plan to mod it a bit. It’s going to be my portable mech keyboard, since it’s so small.