Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Shows great promise, October 21, 2005
My install of this system went fairly smoothly, but it is an amazingly lengthy process, with many stages involving updates and bluetooth reconnects and such. Still, it all worked out and it never left me wondering if I was doing the right thing or not, unlike many hardware/software installations.
The keyboard, mouse and pad have all worked pretty well for me, and the media pad shows great promise as a home theater controller, but I have a couple of quibbles:
1) the mouse charging station is a piece of junk relative to the rest of the system - it's tippy, you have to fiddle to feel that the mouse is making contact, and the power cable easily falls out
2) the keyboard, on waking up, often repeats (many times) one of the characters you type in
3) I _suspect_ the software of periodically bogging my PC down, though I don't know that for sure yet
4) I can assign the keyboard media button to bring up iTunes (and other applications), but the media pad media buttong is not given the same choices for some reason.
Overall I'm very impressed with this, but I AM COUNTING ON LOGITECH to improve the software such that it sees its full potential.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Such high hopes, such meager rewards, March 4, 2006
I have been coveting this sleek keyboard set ever since the first diNovo came out a couple of years ago. I have also been a user of the USB version of the MX1000 mouse since they came out last year, and I have nothing but praise for that product. The convergence of these product lines seemed like a match made in heaven.
But it isn't. For the most part, the problem is Bluetooth. As implemented here, it's a fussy, unreliable, complicated fiasco. Devices (usually the keyboards) randomly stop talking to each other and won't reconnect without a reboot. Once the system was so broken that Logitech's technical support could only suggest that I completely remove the Bluetooth protocol stack and all the additional software and start again from scratch. This did solve the problem, but it was a two-hour ordeal of reconfiguration. I'm sure glad I kept my old mouse and keyboard around!
I have also been using a (Logitech) cell phone style Bluetooth headset in conjunction with this adapter. It works, but just barely. Same problems as the diNovo devices: inconsistent behavior, frequent disconnects for no apparent reason, frequent power cycling and reboots required to set things right.
I notice also with the headset that the Bluetooth range is quite limited. On good days I can go to the adjacent room, but I'm certainly not getting 30 feet of range. And this is true even for listening, which I would imagine is more dependent on the USB adapter than the headset.
Mouse problems are what make this set truly unusable for me. The response is usually OK, but it occasionally becomes noticeably sluggish. Even worse, there seems to be some sort of predictive motion estimation built into the driver software that attempts to cover for gaps in the Bluetooth datastream. But it doesn't work very well -- for the most part, it just feels like the mouse is moving through molasses. Sometimes, the mouse pointer wanders around on its own for up to five seconds without the mouse being touched. (I've been very happy with the responsiveness of the USB version of this mouse.)
The beautiful keyboard is, sadly, undistinguished in actual use. It's sturdy and feels high-quality, but I find that I prefer the feel of my old el cheapo wired IBM keyboard. This may just be personal preference, but this svelte flat keyboard feels, well, too flat. There are legs on the back of the keyboard you can extend, and that helps, but unfortunately the MediaPad lacks them.
Lastly, the MediaPad. Reviewers loved it; not me. In fact, after trying it out for a while I'm totally unclear on the concept. Why would I want my numeric keypad moved off to the side where it's harder to get to and every bump makes it slip and slide around on its own? Why would I want extra copies of the media buttons on the main keyboard that can't be configured on their own? The time and date display is useful, but the driver software prefers to show you what's playing in your media player, and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn this off or switch back to the default display.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Hardware = great; software = horrible, October 19, 2005
I bought this about a week ago and still haven't decided if I'm keeping it (it's really great, when it works properly). So far I haven't been able to go for one day without having to plug in another keyboard / mouse for when I can't reconnect the diNovo.
Let me recount the fun I've had with this:
I took it out of the package and was pleasantly surprised with how it looked and how it was packed; all scratchable surfaces were nicely protected with pronottective plastic backing. I plugged in the hub and used the keyboard with a wired mouse while the included mouse was charging (took about 4 hours). It worked fine without any drivers (except the media pad obviously didn't do anything fancy).
Then the mouse finished charging. It too worked without the drivers. Then I installed the drivers, and the fun began.
During the install I was prompted to update (and an insert in the package said it was very important to do so). After rebooting, I was greeted with a crash while the software finished setting up the hardware; this left the keyboard and mouse unusable; I used another kb/mouse to uninstall the drivers and tried again. To make a very long story short, I started at 10 PM and finished at 6 AM, installed a half dozen times on two different computers, and finally got it working. During the post-install (after rebooting) a firmware upgrade is applied (this is what kept crashing); I suspect it stupidly hard-codes c:\program files\ because on another installation on the same machine (which also happened to use d:\program files) it kept crashing, but on another machine with c:\program files the firmware upgrade was successful (and then it didn't need to do it again, so it worked on the original machine).
Often all three pieces (kb/mouse/mediapad) lose their setpoint detection and stop doing their special functions (e.g. F-lock/media keys, cruise control and tilt scrolling, and the media display stops updating). I can reconnect the devices and then they work properly again. Sometimes they don't reconnect and then I can't do anything because I lack a keyboard or mouse (and often when trying to reconnect, setpoint causes winamp and explorer to hang). I have found that restarting setpoint also redetects the devices sometimes.
Long story short, the software is a mess, be wary.
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