Hands-on: Cyber Snipa USB keyboard

Whether for work or play, a nice keyboard in gunmetal grey.

Professed to be a “gamer’s keyboard”, but really it’s quite an excellent keyboard for any real-world use. Manufacturer Cyber Snipa have a range of gamer’s gear – including a true gamer’s keyboard, being a dedicated WASD layout on a separate unit. This is more of a general purpose device, but we did test it playing hot new FPS Serious Sam 2 and found it an excellent weapon.

Unremarkable but for a 2-port USB hub on one side, and speaker/headphone + mic jacks on the other side. These are very handy, gamer or not. What we did particularly like about the Cyber Snipa is, as Ray Charles would say “the feel”. The keys are big and chunky, well separated and deeply concave. You won’t have any trouble finding keys in a hurry with this baby, or slipping off them in a firefight.

The feel is springy, but inclined more towards mushy than clicky. Personal preference rules here, but our inclined towards the Cyber Snipa’s feel.

Its desk footprint is quite large. Again, personal preference calls the shots here, but again, we prefer a large keyboard for gaming for stability.

A row of multimedia keys along the top are regulation, and we like that Cyber Snipa resisted the temptation to unnecessarily clutter it up with hotkeys nobody ever uses.

To really be a true gamer’s keyboard, the keys need to be backlit. Logitech has a very cool looking keyboard with three levels of key brightness coming for the new year in Australia, and of course there’s the snazzy PowerBook backlit keyboard, so we know it can be done.

Overall, we’d rate the Cyber Snipa USB keyboard as rather nice, but not essential to kicking your frag count up a notch.