hey everybody it’s lon seiben and i love keyboards that integrate pointing devices into them like this one from logitech and the other day i got in this one from lenovo called the thinkpad trackpoint keyboard 2 and this is exactly what it looks like it is a thinkpad keyboard and trackpoint nub integrated into a wireless keyboard for pcs and android devices and other things that support usb or bluetooth keyboards it’s really solid feeling it’s got that thinkpad feel but it’s something that can hook up to just about anything and we’re going to take a closer look at this in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure this came into the channel free of charge from lenovo however all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approve what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this keyboard here is all about now the price point on this one is about a hundred dollars although it’s being sold right now for about 85 on lenovo’s website so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware this is very much a thinkpad keyboard it feels almost identical to the thinkpad laptops we’ve reviewed here on the channel you’ve got these nice big heavy industrial feeling keys with really deep travel you’ve got the track point nub here that works exactly like it does on the thinkpad laptops you got your left and right buttons here along with a scroll button and we’ll play around with all of that in a few minutes decent key layout here my big
gripe is that it is not backlit so if you were trying to use this in a home theater environment you’ll have to feel your way around a little bit if you’re a touch typer not a big deal but i know a lot of people like these keyboards to be backlit and unfortunately this one is not backlit now it attaches to your computer in two different ways both of them wirelessly you can use its included dongle here to get a 2.4 gigahertz connection directly back to your device you just plug this into your computer or tablet or whatever and the keyboard will pair up with it the other option is you can use bluetooth and you configure the bluetooth with this switch right here so when it’s in bluetooth mode it’ll work with just about anything that supports bluetooth and to pair it up what you do is just hold the switch here over to the right and that will put it into pairing mode i got a little confused initially because there’s also a bluetooth key here but i believe this is a shortcut key for windows 10 pcs now there is a switch at the top to move it between android and windows mode and i suspect this switch is for just key mapping so that these shortcuts align with how they would work on the android platform when it’s in that mode for example so if you find that the key mappings are a little bit off on your particular device flick the switch and it’ll go back into a different mode i did try this a little earlier with my mac and i had it in both of those modes and the trackpad and keyboard work fine on both the settings here so it should work pretty well across the board and we’ll test it out with a few different devices here in a minute or two it is rechargeable of course there’s no batteries that you can replace on this one and there is a charging cable for its usb type-c port here the
battery life on this should be pretty good because it doesn’t have a backlight so it should give you probably a month or two of operation depending on how much you’re doing with it and overall i didn’t see any battery issues as i’ve been playing with it you do have a little stand here that you can put in the upward position so it does give it a little bit of an angle as you can see it might be a little bit more comfortable to type on a desk and of course you can put those back down and have it lie flat there is no wrist rest or anything like that that it comes with so you’ll have to improvise your own but if you have a big desk area like i’ve got here it should work pretty nicely it weighs about one pound two ounces or about 510 grams so it feels pretty dense and solid and i really did like the build quality on this one quite a bit all right let’s take a look at this thing in action we’re going to start off with dongle mode here we pulled the dongle out of the back of the garage on the unit and we’re going to pop it into the laptop here you can hear that it detected everything properly and now what i need to do on this end first of all is switch it on there’s a power switch here which we want to put into the on position there’s a little light on the corner that will light up and i also want to make sure that it’s in windows mode which it is and that it’s in dongle position here because if i’m switched to the right here it goes to bluetooth mode so we’re going to switch it into dongle mode here and now if i hit enter i can keep typing so that seems to work just fine the little nub here as you can see is working so i can navigate different things and i can grab that window and move it around if i want we can also visit a website and one of the things that i get very used to on keyboards and trackpads these days is having something that i can scroll with two fingers but this is old school so we have the pointer nub now i can hit the page down key to scroll quickly if i want or i can hit the middle
button here and turn on the scrolling function and as you can see i can move the nub here and scroll at different speeds so this is something that you may or may not like but it’s how the think pads work with their little nub modern think pads also now have a track pad in addition to the nub here but this of course just has the nub so you will have a little bit of a different scrolling experience if you’re used to just doing the two-finger scroll thing now on the top of this here you’ve got some function keys with some things that those keys can do now of course these are your standard f1 through f12 keys and if you just push the f1 here it will register an f1 key press if you want to mute your computer you’ll have to hold down this function key here and then hit that mute button there to get that to work but it seems to work for the most part on windows 10 i did find that some of these functions did not work on this laptop so for example when i hit function f9 to pull up the settings screen nothing’s popping up here so your mileage may vary on a few of these keys but i found that the brightness controls work fine the volume here did as well but not all of them will necessarily map up with your device let’s take a look now and see how it works on the ipad so we have my ipad out on the desk now and we have the keyboard paired up via bluetooth all seems to be working pretty well here i can left click on that article to take a look at it that’s working just fine i can scroll up and down if i hold down the middle button here and move the track point up and down this works most of the time except when you hover over a hyperlink and when you do that it starts scrolling and then it thinks you’re clicking on something and pulls up a contextual menu here so it’s not going to be ideal for scrolling with the middle button i would suggest maybe just using the
page up or page down keys or reaching up and using the screen but you do get a basic mouse functionality here that seems to work fine on the ipad so all good there and the keyboard seems to be working as well so no problems there my typos of course get fixed automatically the one thing though that i found did not work are the special shortcut keys up on the top so i couldn’t get the volume to adjust or the brightness to go up or down and i was using the switch here to go back and forth between windows and android mode both of those didn’t seem to make much of a difference so basic mouse functionality basic keyboard functionality but it does work with the ipad and iphone all right one last thing to take a look at now and that is android compatibility and we’ve got our nvidia shield tv on the desk which is an android tv device the keyboard is switched into android mode and it looks like the mouse is working so we can click on our app selection here and go over to downloader which is an app that my friend elias sava made from aftvnews.com and we can just click on his website here within the app and scroll around i can hold down that middle button to scroll that seems to be working left clicks and right click seem to be working too so all good on that front the escape key is your back button essentially so if i go back to the home screen here and hit escape twice to get out of his app that will kind of replicate that back button you would typically see on your android devices some of these buttons up here are mapped properly as well so i have my mute here volume up and down is working i don’t have a mic on this one but i guess that would mute the mic i don’t have brightness on this really either but that seems to be popping up there as well the rest of these though don’t seem to be working with this particular device so it’ll probably be a device specific thing this device this button here will go into
the multitask chooser but when i just push it once it’ll just go to the last app that i had loaded up so maybe of limited functionality there if i hit the keyboard icon on this particular device it’ll pull up the android search feature here the voice search so that is something that goes on there but overall pretty cool seems to be working as a basic keyboard and mouse with some of the shortcut keys working here as well and all together i think this is a pretty nice little keyboard it’s definitely nicely built it’s not metal or anything but it’s got a good weight to it i like that it’s very compact it would work well i think in a home theater environment for a compact lap keyboard that has full size keys that really feel pretty much like they do on the think pad and if you like that feel i think you’re going to like this one quite a bit it is a little on the pricier side of things at about 85 to 100 dollars but all in a nice solid keyboard here from lenovo if you’re looking for something that reminds you of your favorite laptop that’s going to do it for now until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by theland.tv supporters including gold level supporters brian parker jim peter tom albrecht and chris allegretta if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
Read More: Review IOGEAR 4×4 USB Sharing Switch Share 4 USB devices with 4 Computers
