Gadgetory

today we're going to be doing an unboxing of the SteelSeries shift gaming keyboard so this is the replacement product for the Z board or Zed board and no matter what way I say it somebody's going to complain so I don't care so this is the shift the Z board is gone this is a SteelSeries branded product the Z board was a kind of a legacy product left over from the ideas on acquisition so it was originally the ideas on time okay I'm not going to talk about the Seaboard anymore we're going to talk about the shift so just like the Z board the shift has replaceable key sets removable replaceable re anything of all key sets that means you can put in custom ones for a particular game that you like you can put in the stock one if you don't have a particular game that you like although there's a lot of gaming functions on the stock one let's just get this unboxed and talk about all the different features and get all the different features more than anything else so this is the SteelSeries sticker that is included very irrelevant next we have a professional gaming gear catalog where they actually show here's one of the custom key sets or two of them rather for the shift so there's a world of warcraft one there's a Starcraft 2 one there are a variety of other games a lot of animals that SteelSeries does have custom key sets for it Hey look at this no CD download the latest drivers SteelSeries says so - because they are serious about gaming and so am i when you're serious gamer you're never using drivers off the disk you are always downloading your own so that's in a variety of languages SteelSeries is a worldwide company and they do sell into a number large number rather of different markets so here under a little flap at the top we're going to find a little wrist rest which say I can remove the tape from and we'll show you that as well and then once I've got the product completely removed from the Box I'm just going to close the box back up then we'll have a look at what SteelSeries has to say for themselves on the back of the product here now the thing that stood out to me about the shift more than anything the first time I saw which was quite a while ago actually I mind you that was that was a prototype so the finished product may be slightly different what is the fact that the build quality of it the overall fit and finish of the shift is just worlds ahead worlds ahead of the old Zboard so here I'm actually going to stand over here don't don't shift your angle oh we're going to look at the we're going to look at the shift here so we can install the wrist rest just like that quite easily all right you can see the bottom of its got like this weird like texture thing going on that's kind of neat then you've got oh look at that so you can either tilt it a little bit or a lot or not at all you've got three different settings for the rubberized feet there that's a pretty neat little feature so we're going to not tilt it at all for the sake of this video okay and let's see what SteelSeries has to say so first of all one they have there are eight programmable hotkeys so those are up here on the top there's your eight programmable hotkeys and then number two we have on-the-fly macro recording so that is located right about here so you can just press record macro and you can record a macro next we have multiple media controls so you can see the media control keys are right over here on the left look at the keyboard not the blocks actually here I'll I'll point out where they are sorry about that okay so we've got mute volume up volume down play forward as well as backwards next we have gold plated audio and audio headset jacks so that is on the quite long cord actually that's included on the shift here's all of our plugs so one of these USB s is for the keyboard itself the others for the integrated hub and the other two are for audio so if you do have a SteelSeries headset you can actually shorten the cable on most of them and then you can plug it directly into the back of your keyboard so this is where all of that comes out so there's your USB hub there's your microphone and there is your headphone port so that's a pretty neat little feature because it really reduces the amount of random cable mess around your computer desk next we have yet to USB 2.0 ports one powered ergonomic design with three yet we already showed the other three leg levels and then the detachable wrist rest which we already showed now I'm not going to be able to obviously use it for an extended period of time here and tell you guys my impressions but I can at least tell you how comfortable it feels right off the bat so if I was sitting at sort of a reasonable typing level actually that's that's fairly nice now one of the things that is going to be a little bit different for people is the split in the keyboard so you can see there's actually a hinge that goes right through the spacebar alright and then there is another split right between the keyboard and where the number pad and the other Keys including your arrow keys are so the reason for that is over on this side we have a little latch and we can lift the whole thing up just like that so that is how easy it is to remove the key set so here's the entire shift keyboard with just the key switches installed and nothing else and when you want to put on a new key set you go ahead and you can either by the shift in a bundle sometimes with an appropriate key set or you can buy the key sets on their own so all you need to do is go okay well you know gonna play some Starcraft 2 for my Starcraft 2 key set on there just like that and clip it on that simple pretty neat okay let's look at what else we have here in terms of features I'm going to cheat I'm going to look at the box and see if there's anything that I've missed and I don't believe that there is so there's a lot of there's a lot of key sets as I mentioned before for some MMO some RTS some FPS games mostly it's going to be your more popular games you know Age of Empires Warcraft those kinds of triple-a sorts of titles but yeah the thing that really stands out to me most about the shift compared to the old Zboard oh yeah here's another good one you can actually use your old Zboard key sets with the new shift so like I said the overall build quality the feel of the keys themselves switches that are underneath is much much better on the shift it's just got an overall more robust feel to it and if you just want a new shift and you want to use your old key set it's as simple as just buying a shift taking this off and throwing your old key set on it just like that so thank you for checking out my unboxing if you steel series shift don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other random tech stuff