Hands-on with Angry Miao’s Compact Touch (65 Less) mechanical keyboard

Indignant Miao is at it once more with one other distinctive mechanical keyboard that prices a small fortune. This time it thought, “Hey, wouldn’t you like to make use of completely straight swipe gestures as a substitute of bodily arrow keys?”

This new board is known as the AM Compact Contact. Indignant Miao calls it a 65 p.c board, nevertheless it doesn’t have arrow keys. As an alternative, it has a small touchpad on the entrance for swiping your up, down, left, and proper instructions. If that sounds tedious and finicky, properly, you’re proper, although this keyboard is far more than that. It’s additionally a blended bag of impeccable construct high quality, glorious typing really feel, and a few confounding design selections. It’s set to launch February 2nd on Indiegogo, ranging in value from $398 to a hefty $615 relying on the chosen construct and bundle.

At first look, the AM Compact Contact seems to be much like the Comfortable Hacking Keyboard (affectionately known as HHKB), a singular mechanical keyboard with a hardcore fanbase that loves its structure and thocky-sounding Topre switches. Nonetheless, the Compact Contact’s nods to the HHKB are skin-deep. Whereas the symmetrical design with “blockers” (clean spots within the corners the place the Management keys normally go is pure HHKB, the Compact Contact lacks its different hallmarks, like a break up Backspace key or a Management key rather than Caps Lock. When you’re an HHKB loyalist, you’re most likely howling and pulling your hair out proper now. I can lend a sympathetic ear to rants concerning the inefficiencies of overstretching your pinky to hit Backspace — although frankly, I’m used to residing in sin like that, and it’s straightforward sufficient to remap Management to the Caps Lock key in Indignant Miao’s customized software program. 

HHKB mimicry apart, the Compact Contact shares some traits with different Indignant Miao keyboards. Inside, it makes use of leaf springs just like the AM AFA, permitting customers to tweak the board’s flex and firmness. In prebuilt kind, it comes with pre-lubed icy silver linear switches — the model’s hot-swappable change of selection. Its steel case is CNC-machined from a single block of aluminum, utilizing the same course of to the wildly costly Hatsu. The corporate says it takes a complete of 5 and a half hours to make every Compact Contact chassis. And on the base of that chassis is the acquainted wi-fi charging pad that lets homeowners of the Cybermat go wire-free.

The Compact Contact is launching in seven completely different colorways. Some take inspiration instantly from popular culture: “8-Bit” has Nintendo Famicom-like colours, “Again to the Future” exhibits some semblance to its namesake DeLorean (and with that title, is maybe asking for a stop and desist from Common Photos), and there are particular editions dubbed “Laser” and “Mech Love.” These final two are pricier, with the previous having a blacked-out design with Tesla-headlight-like entrance RGB spill lights — as a result of, after all — and the latter is black and white with predistressed put on and tear and illuminated cutouts impressed by Love, Demise, and Robots.

The number of colours is a welcome addition, in my eyes. I believe most of them look fairly smooth — even when some, just like the hiragana sub-legends on the 8-Bit keycaps, method tryhard cringe ranges (par for the course with Indignant Miao). And I’m fairly relieved that we’re beginning to see AM’s often-used smoked see-through keycaps with a lot cooler grey printed legends rather than the ugly pea inexperienced it so typically used earlier than.

Indignant Miao says its aim with this board was to shrink down the favored 65 p.c structure to a smaller, extra symmetrical, and aesthetically pleasing design. Positive. However a 65 p.c board has devoted arrow keys by definition, and the Compact Contact doesn’t. As an alternative, Indignant Miao gave it a front-mounted contact panel, which measures about two inches vast and a half-inch tall. Whereas it means that you can enter arrow key swipes in all 4 instructions, it’s typically laborious to take action with out making errors. This results in many events of transferring my cursor up once I needed to maneuver it left or down once I meant to maneuver it proper. You may swipe and maintain for steady inputs (the equal of holding down a bodily arrow key), nevertheless it’s straightforward to overshoot. I’ll acknowledge that that is person enter error. However since Home windows and Mac working techniques aren’t constructed for this, you both should study to reside with the occasional misguided arrow or “git gud” at these completely straight swipe gestures — such as you’re taking part in the worst sport of one-thumbed Fruit Ninja.

The most effective half concerning the contact panel is that you simply don’t have to maneuver your proper hand from the house row to make use of arrows, although different boards have figured this out already with the usage of operate layers and keys like J, Ok, L, and I — and even the HHKB’s Fn + [ ; ‘ and /. And any time you save moving your hand about six inches is lost when your cursor inevitably jumps to the top or bottom of a paragraph or line instead of the next letter. If Angry Miao had some kind of software solution to allow the touch panel to control the cursor like iPhones allow when you long-press the virtual spacebar, that might be a game-changer.

Additionally, Indignant Miao missed a possibility to make this keyboard just a little extra left-handed pleasant, because the contact panel is centered on the entrance of the keyboard case and never centered to the place your arms relaxation on the house row. This offers the Compact Contact cleaner, extra balanced traces and a sleeker design, nevertheless it additionally means the touchpad is positioned higher on your proper thumb than your left. It might need been good to make it extra ambidextrous, nevertheless it’s little shock that Indignant Miao will sacrifice performance for A E S T H E T I C S.

There could be a small sense of satisfaction while you nail the right arrow actions such as you’re touchdown a well-timed combo in a combating sport, although it’s laborious to disclaim the sensation that each one you’ve managed to do is overcome an impediment you laid out for your self. And this grew to become most obvious to me as soon as I observed I used to be extra ceaselessly reaching for the mouse for textual content choice and cursor actions — as a result of our brains are wired to search out the trail of least resistance. Maybe for this reason small format boards just like the HHKB use operate layers to imitate their misplaced arrow keys. You may customise the Compact Contact to do exactly that, although if the touchpad goes completely unused, you might query what you spent this cash for.

However I give Indignant Miao credit score for making an attempt one thing novel, and — arrow woes apart — this has turn out to be my favourite AM keyboard in precise use. I’m a sucker for compact keyboards within the 60 to 75 p.c vary, and the Compact Contact does certainly have a stunning design, typing really feel, sound, nice battery life, and quick pairing and swapping between as much as three units by way of Bluetooth.

A part of me needs Indignant Miao simply went for the standard HHKB structure and didn’t trouble with the contact gesture fiddliness. However then, frankly, it wouldn’t be an Indignant Miao keyboard with out some quirks.

Images by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge