Freedom Universal Keyboard 2 Reviews

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I have seen some really negative reviews of this product, but I don't recognise it from them! The only thing I can think to explain it is that there do appear to be two versions of this keyboard, and they're only distinguished by a small superscript '2' at the end of the name (i.e. Freedom Universal Keyboard2). The '2' is the one I have - I bought it from Handtec.co.uk who were extremely efficient at dispatching it!

The keyboard comes boxed with a CD and a detailed manual. I found the manual perfectly adequate. There were a few minor grammatical errors, but nothing that rendered the instructions unintelligible. The keyboard itself feels solidly-built to me and locks together firmly. The case, whilst not real leather, is nice enough and the magnetic clasp snaps satisfyingly securely. The pull-out cradle built into the keyboard is a great idea and makes it much easier to look at the phone's display whilst typing (something to consider if you're looking at other products - I didn't see another keyboard with a similar feature).

As for the setup, well I turned on my HTC Touch HD phone, turned on its wireless internet and connected to the company's driver website which detected my phone model automatically. I had downloaded and installed the driver on my phone in under 3 minutes (possibly it would take you a tad longer over a data connection rather than wireless). I didn't go anywhere near my PC during this time! I also didn't have to enter any kind of product key or code, which some people have complained about. The device then requested a reset, which I did. I followed the instructions in the manual to activate the keyboard and it worked perfectly.

I swear the whole process took no longer than 5 minutes.

I have one reasonably serious complaint. The driver settings boxes are distorted on the HTC Touch HD display, making them hard to read and use. They're JUST about usable, with a bit of guesswork, but it's not great. This just means I can't really customise the keyboard easily, and in particular it's difficult to set the Function key shortcuts. This is a shame because this is potentially a really, really useful feature - basically it allows you to open programs from the keyboard rather than having to pick up the phone and use the touchscreen. However the keyboard still works just fine for basic typing. I have contacted the support team (they have a good website) and I'll see what they come back with.

There are a couple of other points to mention: firstly the keyboard is an American layout, which is a bit annoying for a Brit touch-typist! In particular it means the " and @ signs are in different places, and the £ is quite tricky to get at.

The trick of doing shift-arrow to select text doesn't appear to work, so there's no easy way (that I've found so far) to highlight text from the keyboard. This does sort of render the ctrl-c and ctrl-v shortcuts (which do work) a bit pointless! Also, when filling in online forms, pressing Enter doesn't seem to submit the form. That might be bad web design though rather than a fault of the keyboard. On the plus side, the tab key does cycle through form boxes as expected, which is quite handy.

The keys are quite small, but actually not that bad for a portable fold-up keyboard. Not much worse than a notebook/laptop, and certainly no worse than a netbook. They will take a bit of getting used to if you're a touch-typist, particularly the backspace which is tiny. They 'click' nicely and provide the right level of tactile feedback.

The off switch is very small and fiddly to operate. I can see me forgetting about this and running down the batteries - I'll have to remember to carry spares! Still on the plus side you're unlikely to turn it on or off my accident.

But these minor issues aside this is a brilliant product. I am going to get SO much more out the functionality of my HTC Touch HD now, particularly things like composing emails, Word documents and accessing websites like Facebook. I highly recommend it and I'm still giving it 5 stars overall.