It certainly doesn’t look like it’ll be great fun to type on. And I can’t imagine those keys would look particularly pristine after a spill or two. But, dammit, it’s got Star Wars on it.
I’ve got a partner who is obsessed with the Star Wars world, and I can completely empathise to some degree. I’ve played every Star Wars game I could get my hands on. A stray dog wandered into our yard when my brother and I were barely born; we called her Yoda and she lived for 21 years.
I paid to see Episode Two three times just for the Yoda-Count Dooku fight. Hell, I couldn’t help but drop some money on Star Wars shirts for my partner at the airport.
Star Wars is cool. And so is this Star Wars knock-off from Taiwanese firm B.Friend. I doubt there’s been any oversight from Disney for this — I certainly couldn’t see any at their booth or in their brochure — but they’ve done a half-decent job nonetheless.
Darth Vader takes the place of the Windows key, which seems rather apt for gaming. The font matches Star Wars nicely, there’s some cool logos on the numpad and I like the way they’ve only gone with the traditional black/yellow aesthetic for the spacebar and enter keys.
Not a huge fan of the poo brown for the far left side of the keyboard, but I’ll let that slide.
The product’s not listed on B.Friend’s website and God knows when or if it’d be made available internationally. Probably best that it’s not: I hear Disney’s lawyers are basically the corporate equivalent of a death star.
The author travelled to Computex 2016 as a guest of Intel.