Logitech G15 LCD Keyboard Review - LCD Screen and Media Functions
(Page 3 of 5 )
The keyboard’s LCD screen is probably the biggest attraction to the G15. Promotional pictures show people chatting on the LCD screen and displaying remaining ammunition in video games. It’s the keystone to the keyboard, so let’s see what it can do.
The keyboard comes with only 3 programs that work on the LCD: a clock, a CPU/RAM meter, and a media playing display. Logitech also provides a development kit for any programmers-to-be that wish to customize an LCD application. So suffice it to say that if you expect to be chatting on the LCD or gaming on it out of the box, you’ll probably be disappointed. Thankfully, the coolness of the G15 has brought about a development community that is slowly bringing life to the board. There’s a lot more for it now than there was back when it was introduced in October.
The keyboard officially supports 5 games. One of them has native support in the game for the screen (Rainbow Six Lockdown), and the others require patches (Brothers in Arms, Civilization IV, Star Wars Battlefront II, Unreal 2004). Logitech says that many others are coming, and you can find details on this webpage. Being that none of these are games are so popular that we use them for benchmarking, I can’t test any of these LCD apps specifically. There are still custom LCD apps we can take a look at.
This is the LCD clock, which can remind you that you aren’t getting enough sleep as you game into the wee hours of the AM. That much is pretty obvious, but the buttons aren’t. On the left is a circular button that cycles through all LCD programs running on your computer. The programs have to be active on your desktop (usually in your system tray) for them to work on the keyboard. The four buttons below the screen do nothing in the preloaded programs, but they are programmable and help control downloadable programs.
The other buttons are media controls. You have the usual play/pause, stop, track forward, track backward, and a volume wheel. There is a mod that makes the volume wheel into an iPod ClickWheel. I tried out the media buttons on a few media players. They worked fine with Windows Media Player and iTunes, but they did not control tracks in Winamp. There may have been a patch for this, since there are numerous plugins for Winamp and the G15.
This is the preloaded program that shows the track playing on your PC. It works with every media player I tried.
The preloaded program that shows system status is really barebones. There’s not much here worth watching. There are better system monitors available for download on G15 forums.
Speaking of LCD applications you can download, there are some interesting ones that use the screen creatively. They may not be officially supported by Logitech, but most of them worked for me without problems. A few RSS readers did not set up properly, but the others worked.
This is Buggy, an LCD virtual pet. Similar to Tomogatchis from the 90s, you feed him, clean his cage, make him run around for exercise, and watch him grow from a small square to a large one. Useless, but a novelty.
This is one of the several Winamp plugins. This one puts the Winamp equalizer on the display.
FRAPs graphs your FPS on your LCD display. This is a nice alternative to let you shut off the annoying yellow FPS counter on your screen. The newest version (2.7.3) did not have free support for this feature though. I downloaded the old 2.7.1, which let me use the LCD feature for free.
The program I have enjoyed most so far is a plugin for Miranda IM client. As far as I’m aware, this is the only IM client with an LCD app, though it works with AIM and MSN. The plugin lets you send and receive IMs entirely on the keyboard without losing focus of anything else you are doing. It can also pop up on top of other LCD programs. If, for example, you are playing a game and running FRAPs on the G15, a new IM would pop up on top of the FRAPs LCD display and never interrupt your game.
Next: G Keys and Macros >>
More Input Devices Articles
More By Developer Shed
