Some days ago, I bought a new keyboard/mouse combination, namely the Logitech S530 Mac Desktop. I was tempted to buy it because Cyberport had a promotion and sold it for just €49, compared €62,46 at Amazon.de. After several days of usage, I like the keyboard (which was my main concern before the purchase). Even though I really enjoy typing on my MacBook’s keyboard, which is entirely different from most other keyboards, I quickly accomodated to the new keyboard. The keyboard is rather stable and looks solid. The mouse is not that bad either, but the fact that I constantly scroll to the left (with the four-ways scroll wheel) when I try to perform a middle click, annoys me. The three buttons to control the volume don’t really make sense, adjusting the volume is not something I do twice a minute. And after all, there are three nice buttons on the right side of the keyboard as well.

The Logitech software allows to reconfigure most of the buttons. However, the software is terribly instable; it crashes nearly every time I try to change something. The current software version is 2.1.3 – I guess the developers have cast dice to determine the version number.

One last thing that’s really odd: The symbol on the NumBlock’s Enter button: The Mac platform has a symbol for this: ⌤ (you may not be able to view this on a Windows machine). In lack of this symbol (which is available on the Mac OS X character palette), Logitech’s engineers decided to use a K, clockwise rotated. It comes close, but it’s not quite the symbol. For a Mac specific keyboard, they should at least have used the right symbols…