The very, very nice people at Redragon have very kindly sent me another of their keyboards to test out. This time it’s the Horus K618 – the first full-size keyboard I’ve typed on in quite some time.
The Horus K618 is a 104 key keyboard with an Ultra-Thin low profile. The key switches are Redragon’s own Red low-profile ones, which are 6mm shorter than a standard switch (12mm in total, compared to an 18mm standard switch height). Top those off with some 4mm low-profile key-caps, and you’ve got a board that measures less than 22mm flat from the desktop. That is, I am sure you will agree, a pretty slim keyboard.
The Horus K618 can be connected wired via USB C, via Bluetooth 3.0/5.0, or via 2.4Ghz latency-free Wireless. A little Wireless receiver comes stashed in a niche under the board itself for your to plug into your PC. So, that’s five different device connections you can store and access easily (via Fn + 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5). And the wireless connection is great – I’m used to a very slight delay when trying out the Bluetooth connections on most wireless boards, but I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between working via the Wireless and the wired connection.
Wirelessly, the Horus K618‘s inbuilt 1900 mAh lithium battery means it should stay operational for 30 hours before needing a recharge. Now, in terms of gaming, I can totally see the advantage of not being tied to your computer via a wire and having a latency-free connection, but the Horus K618 is also just about the first full-size board I can seriously imagine a writer carrying around with them. If you wanted the full-size desktop typing experience in a mobile form, then connecting the Horus K618 wirelessly to your laptop is pretty much the ultimate version of that.
The Horus K618‘s RGB backlights promise 16.8 million colours, a huge array of pre-installed patterns and effects, and the option to customise and create your own via Redragon’s own software. As usual, I set it to a solid colour as soon as I could because I’m not the target audience for this stuff.
What I did really, really like and find useful were the mute/unmute, play/pause, skip forward, and skip backward media buttons, and the scroll volume/brightness control. All features I very much miss when I’m not using my beloved B21.
The Horus K618 also comes equipped with 10 Macro keys for recording and playing (and deleting and re-recording) Macros on-the-fly, with no need for external software. If, like me, you don’t really understand Macros, then it’s basiclaly this: you can record a series of actions (e.g. a key-press followed by a mouse click followed by another key-press) and then play that series of actions back by pressing a single key. As you can imagine, this is very handy for gaming and programming, but even though I think I just about understand it now, I’ve never tried to make any practical use of it myself. Key remapping, keybindings are all fully customisabale via the Redragon software.
Redragon are predominantly known as a company that puts out high-quality, yet affordable gaming keyboards and accessories, and the Horus K618 is very much a gaming keyboard. Low-profile switches are favoured by some gamers because they offer a shorter travel distance and faster actuation than standard switches (in layman’s terms they make your keypresses faster). They can also improve typing speed for the same reasons, but that depends on the typist, of course. Now, even though I’m very much a mechanical keyboard fan, I am not obsessed with finding the loudest, clickiest switches possible (I’m not sure many people actually are, but that is the kind of comedy stereotype of a mech user/fan). I normally favour a tactile switch like a Cherry MX or Gateron Brown, but I am also definitely a fan of a pretty chunky key-cap. I like to feel the impact of the key presses, and I like a bit of haptic feedback. As a result, I did find that typing on the Horus K618 felt a little bit too “flat” for my own day to day typing. That’s simply a matter of personal preference though. I especially feel like anyone used to (and fairly happy with) working on a laptop keyboard would find the Horus K618 an incredibly useful upgrade to their set-up.
As someone very used to, and comfortable, typing on a 68 key keyboard, the Horus K618 felt like it was too much for me in many ways – like it wasn’t a board I could fully make use of. That said, if you want a keyboard that truly does it all, you would be extremely hard pushed to find anything of the same high quality and high spec capabilities within the same price range.
The Redragon Horus K618 is available now via the Redragon website for $79.99 USD / £60 GBP