Customer Reviews

Kensington 64382 PilotBoard Wireless USB Desktop for Mac (Mac)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I bought this in the hope of getting all the multimedia and browser buttons of a Microsoft keyboard but the correct key labels and layout for my Mac. Having switched from a MS keyboard, however, I'm now regretting it. The Kensington pilot board seems to have significant difficulties transmitting wirelessly, as it regularly drops keystrokes and often shows a perceptible lag between key hit and computer response (compared to a wired keyboard). I'm returning mine.

We are using this product with a new iMac G5. The keyboard works well and has nice functionality in the form of all the custom buttons. Keep in mind the board along with the hand-rest take quite a significant chunk of space on the desktop - significantly more than the minimal Apple keyboard. The mouse looks and feels great and is designed very ergonomically. It's one major fault is that its wireless trait make the cursor (little arrow) very jittery and I couldn't quite find a good compromise. It is adjustable and there are different settings, but compared with a standard wired-mouse, it is very difficult to get the cursor point exactly where you want it, particularly in slow speeds. This one thing damages the whole experience with the product and should be considered when purchasing it.

Also, after about 3 weeks (of rather minimal use), the batteries of the keyboard already need to be replaced!

I bought this keyboard for my Mac Mini recently, and I am not happy. The keyboard lags just enough to drive me insane! For example, while capitalizing the first letter of a sentence, if my finger lingers on the Shift key for just a bit too long, the next 5 characters I type take about a half a second to appear, and are all capitalized. Likewise, the mouse takes anywhere from 2 to 5 seconds to respond after waking from the screensaver.

The Mac software for this supposedly Mac-compatible keyboard is worse. Some of the extra buttons do nothing at all in the Mac OS, and others don't do what one would expect. The browser buttons only support Safari, and do nothing in third-party browsers such as Firefox and Seamonkey (support "may be added in future versions" according to the manufacturer's website, but the current version is over a year old). The multimedia keys control iTunes only, not Quicktime or any other multimedia application. If iTunes isn't running when I press one of the multimedia keys, it will start iTunes then perform that function; a pointless and annoying feature. The interface to remap the buttons includes all of 3 buttons, one of which is incorrectly labeled. I have yet to determine battery life, as the software randomly pops up "low battery" messages no matter how recently I replaced them. Overall, a very shoddy and useless driver program.

I'm irritated that I wasted my money on this thing. Even with the recent price drop, it's not worth the money.

***EDIT***
After this set failed me for my Mac, I gave it to my wife for her Windows machine. It worked OK untill I downloaded and installed the driver software so I could remap the extra buttons beyond the defaults. Now the multimedia and Internet buttons on the keyboard no longer work, and the mouse is permanently borked. It responds to clicks, but it will not respond to movements. I've even uninstalled the software and the drivers in hopes of returning to its former working state, but it still refuses to function.

Don't waste your money on this! There's a reason they just reduced the price by $30. Even at the reduced price it's still not worth the money.

The keyboard sometimes misses, I believe because of signal interruption. This is a real hassle, It is nt from lack of keypad pressure on my part. I also agree that the extra buttons don't work and the software was no help. It really stinks.

The wireless range is quite poor. Range is improved somewhat by 'pointing' the dome of the receiver right at the mouse, e.g. velcroed to the bottom of your display. The keyboard and/or mouse just flake out after a few months.

We haven't had trouble with the driver in Panther and Tiger, the volume and itunes controls work fine, when the stuff works at all.

The one saving grace is Kensington's excellent warranty service. The system has a five year warranty. The 800 number gets you to a human pretty quickly. Tell them your troubles, your serial #, your address, guess at the purchase date, and a week later a whole new kit arrives. The new ones work fairly well for a few months, then start dropping key and mouse strokes. I do wish they would actually take the dead ones back for postmortems, maybe they'd learn to make reliable gear.

Doesn't work right... It takes forever to get it to connect to the receiver, then when it finally connects, half the keys don't work. I'm not talking about the extra function keys, half the alphabetical keys don't work. S, B, T most of them don't work. Waste of money.

I bought this to use as a secondary keyboard and mouse at home to use with my MacBook Pro. I have the Apple Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard at work, they are fantastic!!!

For starters I had lots fo trouble getting the software to work, maybe it was an Intel issues but for what ever reason it took a while and several tries at downloading from the Kensington web site to get it to work. Then after a few days the Mouse stopped working. So I started bringing home my Apple Bluetooth mouse, not a big deal it's small enough to bring home everyday, but it is a pain. Now today only about three weeks after I bought it the keyboard stopped working, I changed the batteries but still nothing, restarted, still nothing.

It's not worth the money you save, go with the Bluetooth Keyboard and mouse from Apple, they are well worth it!!! I may try the Logitech Keyboard and Mouse set but it's till RF not Bluetooth, I don't know why manufacturers are not making more Bluetooth sets rather than RF.

The keyboard works fine, however all of the key functions do not work on my
Power Mac G4. Many keys at the top do not function as they should and I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it is meant for a windows computer.

The basic keys do work fine and I can function well using it. A beginning computer user might have trouble if they were not familiar with computers.

thanks

David

I am a Windows user and concur with other bad reviews on this product. I have had similar problems. Most of the extra keyboard functions do nothing. I have had problems with my mouse that the click would work but the mouse movement would not. Ever since installing the product my OS takes 10 - 15 seconds longer to boot-up. To get everything working to an acceptable state I have had to do a lot of re-installing and tweaking. Currently I have everything setup so that it works fine minus all the extra key functionality (bummer). Maybe if I tried a little harder I could get the extra keys working, but its not worth putting more time into it--it does what I need it to do. FYI I am a Software Engineer with a CS degree and I found this difficult to impossible to get working as it should. Kensington!!! You need a patch for this. ...and... It better not break mouse functionality again!!!!

I actually got this product because I was attempting to use up some store credit at Best Buy and thought that a wireless keyboard and mouse would be nice to have. Unfortunately, I couldn't have been more wrong.
The keyboard is acceptable for day navigating your machine and surfing the web, but the rate of dropped key-presses makes it unusable for writing out anything lengthy, and coding becomes an impossibility.
To give this a little perspective, when using a wired keyboard to code I have about one mistake every 30 lines, with this wireless keyboard I had a mistake or two on each line.

The mouse is even worse, it eats through batteries like there's no tomorrow, doesn't have more than 3 feet of range, and doesn't track properly on most surfaces.

I would stay away from this product at all costs, even though it has come down in price by almost $40 it is not worth it.