today we're going to be doing an unboxing of the steel series shift
gaming keyboard so this is the
replacement product for the zboard or
zedboard and no matter what way I say it somebody's going to complain so I don't
care um so this is the shift the zboard
is gone this is a steel series branded product the zboard was a kind of a
legacy product left over from the ideason acquisition so it was originally
the ideason any okay I'm not going to talk about the zboard anymore we're
going to talk about the shift so just like the zboard the shift has
replaceable key sets removable replaceable reenable 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 of the different features and yeah all the different
features more than anything else so this is the steel series sticker that is
included very irrelevant uh 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 MMOs uh that steel series does have
custom key sets for hey hey look at this no CD download the latest driver steel
series says so too because they are serious about gaming and so am I and
when you're a serious gamer you're never using drivers off the disc you are
always downloading your own so that's in a variety of languages steel series 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 uh hopefully 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 and we'll have a look at what steals Series 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 else the first time I saw it which was quite a while ago
actually um mind you that was a that was a prototype so the finished product may
be slightly different was 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 though
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 it it's got like this weird like texture thing going on that's kind
of neat then you've got uh oh look at that so you can either tilt it a little
bit or a lot or not at all you got three
different settings for the rubberized feet there that's a pretty neat little
feature so uh we're going to not tilt it at all for the sake of this video okay
and let's see what steel Series has to say okay so first of all one they have
there are eight programmable hot keys so those are up here at the top there's
your eight programmable hotkeys and then number two we have on thefly 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 BLX 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 USBS is for the keyboard itself the other is for the
integrated Hub and the other two are for audio so if you do have a steel series
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
yeah two USB 2.0 ports one powered ergonomic design with three yeah we
already showed the uh the 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 uh different for people is the split in
the keyboard so you can see there's actually a hinge that goes right through
the space bar all right and then there is another split right between the
keyboard and where the number pad and the other key 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 buy 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 going to play some Starcraft 2
throw 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 uh 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 AAA sorts of titles but uh 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 the 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
of the steel series shift don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips for more
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