Das Keyboard 5Q Review: Excellent for Typing, Not So Much for Notifications

It turns out they weren’t kidding when they said the cloud was going to be everywhere. Its latest home is the Das Keyboard 5Q, self-proclaimed as the first computer keyboard that is cloud-enabled.

Some logical next questions are bound to follow. Namely, what is a cloud-enabled keyboard, and why would you want such a thing? Both of those are a little tricky to answer.

First up, a cloud-enabled keyboard is really just shorthand for a keyboard that supports IFTTT. For those unfamiliar, IFTTT stands for If This Then That, and it’s a free, web-based service that lets you tie various devices and services together with a rudimentary scripting language. Want your Philips Hue lights to blink red when someone appears in front of your Ring doorbell system? IFTTT can tie them together. (The 5Q also works with a similar service for web apps, Zapier.) What Das has done is bring the keyboard into that ecosystem, so if someone’s at the door, you can have the D key blink red.

sound neat , but in test the Das Keyboard 5Q , it quickly became apparent that key blink or change color is rarely the most effective way to be alert to something — especially something urgent , since a blink key is easy to miss . Das is offers offer a number of pre – build recipe to try , but few of them are very useful , such as notify your keyboard when a Twitch stream you follow begin , or alert you via keyboard ” when your BMW is arrive soon . “

This concept made better sense with another recipe I created, connecting Notion sensors on my garage doors to set a color on my keyboard’s number keys: Green for “garage door closed,” red for “garage door opened.” Now this was handy: At a glance I could always tell whether someone had left a garage door open. Of course, all of this only works as well as your smart home gear. I tried the same trick for the door of my Samsung refrigerator, and it never worked at all, nor did an ostensibly handy recipe that was supposed to urge me to stand up and stretch every hour by flashing the Escape key. That’s more troubling, since that should only have to rely on the clock, not another device. Whatever you set up, though, note that configuring all of this within IFTTT can be a quite lengthy process that I imagine will try the patience of anyone who’s not an expert with the web service.

Lights Out

Das Keyboard

Just before launch the product , Das Keyboard is added add another feature call Command Center to the mix . This feature is design to let you use a key shortcut on the keyboard to control your smart home gear directly — press a certain button combination to turn the light on , for example .