2.4 GHz Wireless Keyboard and Optical Mouse Set - AKM11AU product reviews

Having used a fair few wireless keyboards and mice since the days of the infancy of this tech, I have seen some real disasters hitting the market, and a few real gems. For the pricetag, this is certainly one of the better quality gems you'll get your hands on when browsing your favourite retail store.

With all the features of any wired multimedia keyboard, plus an optical (alas, not laser) mouse, that will both run off of 2 x 'AAA' batteries each, this is a nifty little kit suitable for any home or small business user. With the battery-saving power features you usually find in higher-end models, you can expect to get some great usage time out of them before needing to slap in more cells... and they even throw a full set of batteries into the box for you at the factory. My advice: Stick them into your kids toys or tv remote instead, and put something with some serious industrial grunt into this gear instead. You'll give yourself a huge amount of worry-free usage that way.

The keyboard is amazingly light at around 700g give or take a few, and the mouse is stunningly good at under 100g... so if you have decided to use these instead of your laptop's compressed versions, then you'll be glad of the lightweight form factor. You'll also love the ease of installation. Though it comes with a dinky mini-CD with driver installers on it, you should be able to simply slap in the batteries (if you haven't already), pop the ultra-tiny 2.4GHz receiver into an available USB port, and you're away! No installs, no annoyingly-tiny 'sync' buttons to dig away at with a bent paperclip... just a fine example of "plug 'n' play" at it's best. However, if you plan to use multiple units within the 10m operating range, you may find signal conflicts, as there doesn't appear to be an obvious way to select frequency channels. We'd need a couple more test units on hand to check that theory.

My only gripe with this rig is that there doesn't appear to be any indicator lights signalling "capslock is on" or "numlock is active" - which is quite frustrating for those of us who stare intently at the keyboard while typing away at 100+ words per minute... only to discover our efforts have left us with a 3-page document full of CAPITAL LETTERS, WHICH CAN BE REALLY HARD ON THE EYES.

Overall, a great little rig, and one I plan to test on a single set of Energizer Lithium batteries to see how long it runs under normal use-abuse situations. (Use-abuse is where we subject a test unit to a workload equivalent to it's normal environment, but non-stop until failure. We have trained chimps for this job. )