The Best of Both Phone, and Tablet
As with the G15, the G19 provides you with a secondary display, ostensibly to minimize the number of times you switch out of a game to the Windows desktop to check the time, your in-box, or get other information. Unlike the G15's two-tone model, the G19 gets full color output and a larger 320x240 screen size. Logitech includes 11 different applications you can use on the screen of the G19, among them a clock, a system performance monitor, an RSS reader, photo and video players, and an app that lets you play YouTube videos. All of those programs have option screens--accessible through both the LCD Manager software and through a set of screen menu controls on the keyboard itself--that let you change content source folders and make other adjustments.
The G19 also comes with built-in support for 46 PC games, and four different applications, including Ventrilo, the popular third-party voice chat software favored by many PC gamers. "Support" for those various titles means essentially that the screen will display different information, such as character stats and ammunition counts. We haven't tried every game on the list, many of which are outdated, but we never found the game-specific information that handy during gameplay. We can see a few possibilities that would make the LCD screen more useful, such as giving you an extra inventory screen or showing an in-game map, but we haven't seen those kinds of features implemented in the handful of titles we've tried. We do, however, like the Ventrilo plug-in that lets you know who's talking, which can be useful if you don't know everyone in your World of Warcraft guild by voice.
Potentially more exciting is that, as with the G15, Logitech also includes a software development kit for the G19's LCD. It took a while for the enthusiast community to embrace the G15's kit, but once it did, all kinds of mini apps became available for public download. We don't expect the G19's software library to have blossomed in the three months since the keyboard's release, but without a critical mass of homemade applications, it's hard for us to say what kinds of programs might come from the community. You can use some of the homebrewed G15 apps on the G19, but not all of them work on the new color screen. We also can't help but wonder what effect the G19's high price will have on the adoption rate among the enthusiast community. If fewer people buy the G19, that will surely affect the amount of collective effort behind any software development.
