Prestigio Click&Touch: a virtual mouse & touchpad on a keyboard
The Prestigio Click&Touch keyboard from Clevetura is a clever and somewhat unusual piece of kit.
Let’s just state this plain and simple: this is a Bluetooth keyboard that acts as keyboard, but also as a mouse and a swipeable touchpad.
Before we talk about the product, let’s point out what that means. Yes you could use it with a laptop or even with a larger machine. But, crucially, it also means you can use it with a tablet.
We’ve used other Bluetooth keyboards with tablets and it’s a nice way of being able to type properly and get a little more full-blown machine feel out of your mobile device. But with this product you can also ‘point’ onto the screen and use mouse-type commands.
You can be typing away and then rest a single finger on the keyboard (almosty anywhere at all) and a mouse ‘pointer’ icon will appear. Similarly, if you rest two fingers on the keyboard you’ll have ‘grabbed’ the screen for scroll up and down functions.
In total, 84% of the keyboard’s surface is enabled for multi-touch panel with gesture support.
Volume-inous
As a nice touch, you can swipe left or right across the top right keys (where volume UP-DOWN-PLAY-PAUSE is usually located) to turn the volume up and down on a device.
The product itself was presented to Computer Weekly Inspect-a-Gadget by Anatolij Kozlovskij, business development manager at Clevetura LLC. The company describes itself as a ‘design house’ with headquarters in Minsk, Belarus and an office in Shenzhen, China.
Founded in 2017, the company develops technology called TouchOnKeys™.
“TouchOnKeys adds a touch layer to a traditional keyboard. It enables the user to control a mouse pointer and also to click, scroll, zoom and make other gestures directly on the keyboard surface, like on a touchpad. Keys are still fully ‘pressable’ with good ambiance due to the product’s reliable scissors mechanics. Finally, users don’t need to press any key to switch between typing and touch modes, it works automatically and seamlessly,” notes the company, in an official statement.
The unit itself is very lightweight, very – but not to the extent that it feels fragile or weak. It can be connected to up to five Bluetooth devices at the same time – although, that said, there are three Bluetooth channels you can switch between, so realistically you’d only ever connect to three devices (laptop, tablet and PC for example).
Dongle dingles
Charging is via a USB Type C jack and there’s a USB dongle for non-Bluetooth devices, or ones that play silly when it comes to wireless connections, which some inevitably do.
The only downside we experienced with this product was the Bluetooth seemed to drop off when not in constant use. The power button is easily accessible and the unit reboots up in less than a second and you don’t need to go your device’s SETTINGS to re-establish the connection, so perhaps it’s a power-saving function that makes sense.
The Prestigio Click&Touch keyboard is priced at £99.0 on Amazon at the time of writing.
Image source: Clevetura
Taylor Swift’s Belarusian look-a-likey using a Prestigio Click&Touch keyboard – image source: Clevetura