First up we will be looking at the RollerMouse Red by Contour Designs. The RollerMouse Red is a master class on form meets function, creating an ultra elegant piece of tech that you want to use everyday and show off to your friends. Made of premium materials, aluminum wrapped in black leather, with silver and red highlights. The pinnacle of mice for those who would like an ambidextrous control experience to alleviate or prevent repetitive motion injuries. RollerMouse is titled such, because the main interaction for controlling your mouse input is a rolling bar that is essentially suspended before you. This bar is 11.69 inches in length. It has a shorter rubberized bar called the Rollerbar, with massage bubbles on it that is 7 inches in length.

The Rollerbar slides back and forth and rotates on the main suspended bar. This is how the mouse is controlled on the screen. Sliding the bar left results in the mouse going left, rolling the bar up and down results in the mouse travelling up and down. There is an additional feature of being able to change how far the mouse travels on the screen based on your interaction distance on the bar by sweeping all the way to the left or right, resets the home position of the Rollerbar allowing for easy switching between left and right hands. This is done by laser tracking movement on the Rollerbar. The entire bar can be depressed by putting a bit of force into it resulting in a left click. The amount of force required to do this can be adjusted within the settings using the settings button in the center of the RollerMouse face just below the LED's. The mouse click action also comes with a sound which can also be lowered in volume or turned off.

The RollerMouse Red is a specific line of RollerMouse. You could say it is the creme de la creme! This line comes in two flavors. One has a smaller palm rest for those who like to suspend their hands while typing and the other is Titled RollerMouse Red Plus which has a larger palm rest area to engage your wrists with when typing. The RollerMouse is designed to sit in front of your keyboard, a straight keyboard at that, because the distance isn't comfortable on an ergonomic keyboard to rest your wrist while typing. If you purchase the regular RollerMouse Red, you do have the ability to upgrade it later to the Plus since the palm rest is removable. The palm rest is made out of premium materials, a memory foam pad wrapped in leather. It feels absolutely blissful to use the Plus as a palm rest and as a wrist rest. Even as an elbow rest despite how thin the material is. The profile of it is a sweeping slope that curves down into the bar area then rises to a peak, flowing down to meet the surface of your desktop.

The RollerMouse Red has feet that can be slid onto the front of the mouse platform. These feet are for your keyboard to rest on. There are essentially two stages, so if you like your keyboard to be lower or higher for comfortable use, that is an available option for you. You could also use it without the feet. We preferred the lower stage of the feet. Allowing for clearance in front of the RollerBar for our finger to roll the bar without contacting the keyboard, we were able to use the keyboard while resting our wrists on the palm rest of the RollerMouse. The face controls of the RollerMouse Red sit a bit off center to the left of the overall platform due to how a keyboard is used. Since you spend most of your time over the QWERTY buttons your home position is going to be there on the RollerMouse Red. Then the palm rest and bar area sweep off to the right allowing you to rest your hands as you use the directional and number pad keys.

The controls of the RollerMouse Red consists of in the upper left a copy button, below it a left click button. To the right of that button on the bottom, centered is a double click button. To the right of that, mirroring the left click button, is the right click button. Above that is the past button, In the center of it all is a scroll wheel coated in a rubber with indents in it for grip that is extremely responsive and feels great to use! It is also clickable. Above that is the settings button and above that is the set of LED's to inform you of what you are setting. You can adjust things like the cursor speed, pressure sensitivity of the left click on the RollerBar and the sound of clicking. The dedicated copy, paste, and double click buttons are a great asset. It's so much easier to just highlight something with by pressing the double click button, then hitting the copy button, then inputting that copy by hitting the paste button. Like anything it takes time to get used to since this is a totally different way of controlling mice. The dedicated left click button allows you to have finer control when doing things like highlighting and selecting, that isn't going to be affected by the movement of the bar as you are trying to press it. This is a really well thought out design.

Initially when we purchased the RollerMouse it only came in the hardwired model, plugging into your computer with the USB cable. The newer version is wireless and is a huge improvement over the previous version because of it. This frees you up to use the RollerMouse from whatever distance you need within reason. Even if you would like to use a lapdesk while lounging in front of the TV, all you have to do is plug in the wireless USB receiver and away you go! It is rechargeable via the included micro USB cable. A charge lasts for 30 days of continuous use. There is a push button LED indicator that will tell you the charge on the mouse via the 5 LED's, from left to right, going orange to green. Once the green starts to fade away, and the indicators run into the orange LED's you know you are starting to run low on battery. With its excellent battery life and high quality materials the RollerMouse Red is an expensive but worth it addition to your must have tech gear!

The next item we will be looking at is the Azio Aramato Qwertywriter S Typewriter inspired keyboard. This is an ultra elegant, luxurious keyboard for those who want something that makes them feel special. Aimed at gamers with 5 dedicated macro buttons on the left side, as well as a recording button above them, the Aramato comes in only a hard wired flavor. The keyboard is a throwback to typewriter days, having rounded keys that are piano black ringed in silver. Though it is all plastic it feels good to interact with. The keys themselves are concave with a grippy texture to them to help you grip them as you use them. This is definitely necessary since one of the drawbacks of this keyboard is its long stroke to simulate the typewriter feeling. This long stroke slows down your typing speed, so for those who are completely focused on speed is everything, you will want to give the Aramato a pass, but for those who want that unique crafted feel, the Armatao is there for you with its black and silver layout combined with a brushed aluminum base with grating highlights and silver chamfers.

The Aramato is a mechanical keyboard so each button press produces a clicking sound. The clicking sound is akin to that of typewriters of old but not as loud. The Aramato comes equipped with dedicated media control buttons on the upper right side. We think that the pressure to activate these buttons is too high so we tend not to use them, and they don't feel that great to press but they are still cool to look at. What is really cool is the silver barrel end of the media play buttons is actually the volume control. So like how you would load paper into a typewriter, you control the volume by rotating the wheel. This wheel has stops in it so it can be rotated at specific intervals, but other than that it can turn for infinity in either direction. The Aramato is a heavy keyboard that is designed to last. It is backlit with controllable brightness.

A really cool feature is that when you plug-in/power on the keyboard it goes through a light symphony on the keys, putting on a visual feast for your eyes. It would be nice if you could select it to continue performing this symphony as long you want it on, but unfortunately it just has the standard backlighting with a brightness adjustment. The difference with the lighting is the light doesn't come through the keys but shines around the keys, so the keys themselves don't light. On other newer versions of keyboards offered by Azio they do offer this, so it would be nice if Azio would come out with a wireless version that has backlighting that comes through the keys. Otherwise, for those who want style above anything else, the Azio Aramato is for you! The Aramato comes with full N key rollover. Supports Windows, Vista, 7, 8, and 10. Weighs 3 lbs. The palm rest that comes with it we didn't find useful at all, so it's a great thing it's removable. Keyboard dimensions are 6.5 in x 19 in x .5 in.

Next we are looking at the Corsair K83 Wireless Entertainment Keyboard. This keyboard is gaming inspired with a dedicated clickable joystick for controlling the mouse in the upper right for your thumb to rest on. A left click shoulder button at the top right of the keyboard, and then on the back side of the keyboard is a dedicated right click. All reachable with the same right hand position. This joystick and the following controls sit on an elevated platform base in comparison to the rest of the keyboard. To the left of the joystick is a knurled volume scroll wheel. Below that is a backlighting button and function key lock button. Sitting beneath these, on the same elevated platform above the rest of the keyboard is a circular touch pad making you think of a speaker or cup holder. Below that is left and right click buttons for mouse controls.

The keyboard itself is a full sized keyboard which is awesome! The keys are concave and really hold your fingers well, no worries about sweating making you miss key presses here. WASD buttons are a different color than the rest of the keys to help them stand out since once again this is a gaming inspired keyboard. The up and down keys though are small and hard to press. There are media control hot keys at the top of the board using the fn button, as well as a back, home, search and files button. These keys are highly responsive and enjoyable to press. Overall the Corsair K83 is the most fully realized and interesting multimedia keyboard to use.

The final keyboard we will be looking at is the Inland ProHT 2.4G Wireless Mini Multimedia Keyboard. This keyboard is the most compact multimedia keyboard with a trackball around. It has dedicated media buttons on the left and right side of the keyboard. The top of the keyboard has dedicated hotkeys for home, back, forward, close, refresh, search and email. Despite the small size of the keyboard, the buttons you use the most are the largest and are a uniform size which makes it easier to type on. Those with fat fingers though, will find this keyboard difficult to use like a normal keyboard. We like that the arrow buttons aren't shrunk to a tiny size. The buttons on the keyboard are convex though which makes it harder to hit the key you want accurately since the keys have a lot of travel to them. Finding the keys like backspace and entering without sight is a bit aggravating because of the tactile feedback and size of the buttons.

The ProHT comes with a trackball wheel on the upper right side of the keyboard that is well within thumb placement. Below that is a scroll wheel and below the scroll wheel is a left and right click mouse button. At the top of the keyboard are shoulder buttons on the left and right. They are for performing left and right clicks so you can keep your thumb on the joystick as you operate them. The backside has relief cutouts for your hands on each side of the cutout for grip. The ProHT uses two AAA batteries. It connects to the 2.4GHz rf USB connector that is within the back of the keyboard. The entire unit is plastic and the device weighs in at 10.7 oz. For those looking for a mini wireless keyboard, the ProHT is a pretty good offering!