Ideazon Merc Gaming Keyboard review

At 21.5 inches wide, we commend Ideazon on cramming the large game pad next to the standard keyboard. That's only an inch and a half wider than the Razer Tarantula. But one of the things we love about the Tarantula is its key spacing. Your fingers rarely mash mistakenly into other keys on Razer's masterpiece. Not so with the Merc. The soft, thick-feeling key response doesn't lend itself to sending your fingers flying over the standard keys. We also don't like the right-side number pad. On many newer keyboards, you'll find separate clusters of cursor keys, the Home, End, and Delete keys, with the number keys isolated in their own familiar pad layout. The Merc mashes all of those keys into one area and doubles up their function, which means that the 8 key is also the Home key, but you have to toggle with the NumLock key to get the proper command. Who wants that extra step?

In the case of the game pad, it's more the key design that makes it difficult to use. We'd expect a nonstandard layout such as this to take some getting used to, but even after you get past the learning curve, the combination of convex and concave round keys are too close together and too similar feeling. They seem to invite mistaken keystrokes.