So the big trend recently in mechanical keyboards has been optical switches. You have even seen companies like Razer jumping on just this past week. I’ve had a few in the office testing like the Bloody B975 that I reviewed a few weeks ago. But there is one keyboard that is taking a different approach. Its called the Wooting One. It’s an optical keyboard as ell and its been out for a while. They actually have their Kickstarter live right now for the full sized Wooting Two. Anyhow, I have been testing the TKL sized Wooting One for a while now. It uses Flaretech optical switches and with those, they are able to offer a full analog input experience. What that means is where other keyboard switches are just on or off, these are like a gas pedal and can detect input through the entire range. For most things, you will use them in a normal way, but in some games, you can use them to get a better control. So today I’m going to check out what the whole Wooting experience is all about and see how their keyboard stands out.


Product Name: Wooting One

Review Sample Provided by: Wooting

Written by: Wes Compton

Pictures by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

specs 

 


Packaging

So for packaging, the Wooting One comes in an all black box. On the top is the Wooting One branding and the Wooting logo up in the top left corner. They didn’t put anything else on the entire box other than their web address on the back. They also aren’t selling in retail stores from what I can tell so there isn’t much of a need for all of the other information to be on the box when it would be on the webstore description.

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When you open up the box, right up top is the keyboard. It comes with a formed plastic shell over it that keeps everything in place and could also be used as a dust cover. I really love the small <3 along the bottom edge in this area.

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Then up under the keyboard is a foam tray. This is where all of the accessories are. If you look you can see that they have a few extra cutouts that aren’t being used currently as well.

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So the Wooting One comes with a few different things. For documentation, they did include a quick start guide. But with that, there is also a postcard with greetings from Wooting on the front. This has a few pictures of the team inside of the letters. Then on the back, they have a big thank you mentioning that they owe you one and that if you need a favor and send them the card they will do their best to help. This is such an awesome way to thank their first buyers and I will be curious to see what they get on cards in the future!

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For accessories, you get a bright orange switch and keycap puller. It is a plastic puller and for keycaps that isn’t my preferred setup. But you will need this to pull the keyswitches off. Speaking of that, they also include a few extra switches. You get four of each type. Now obviously we shouldn’t need the extra linear switches but its cool to have them to check out or to replace any that get damaged. You get a small bag of screws, these seem to be replacements for around the keyboard, like on the backplate. Then the keyboard's cord is included as well. Without it, you wouldn’t get much use out of the board right? It is sleeved and comes with a Wooting branded Velcro strap.

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Photos and Features

So the Wooting One is a TKL or TenKeyLess keyboard. Bringing a TKL out as their first keyboard would look a little crazy to the mainstream market but it isn’t really unusual to see TKL or 60% boards for first models in the enthusiast market and the Wooting team are clearly enthusiasts. They do however have a full-sized model on the way called the Wooting Two. The Wooting One has a bezel-less design, the same one that Corsair’s keyboards really spearheaded 6/7 years ago. This means the keys are floating with the backplate being the main structure of the keyboard. The Wooting One backplate wraps around the bottom for a better transition along the bottom. This design is easier to keep clean, blowing air will push your crumbs and hair right off the keyboard. The downside is the switches are visible from the side and depending on how the lighting is done it could also give a glow around the keys. Some people like that look, others don’t.

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The Wooting One is a complete traditional TKL key layout. This means you get full support for aftermarket keycaps without having to worry about weird bottom row keys. That means you have a full F key row, the direction pad, and the alphas and modifiers. Now the scroll lock key is missing with a mode key in its place. But I doubt many people will even notice, I didn’t even notice for about a month. The backplate is blacked out with a rough finish and it paired up with the black keys for a clean look. The font used for legends is easy to read and Wooting was careful to avoid any of the “gaming” fonts that far too many boards go with. The only other thing unique on the board is the W Wooting logo key used to replace the windows keys. This gives a touch of branding without being in your face and also means Mac users don’t have a windows logo on their keyboards.

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There are a few function layer things. The home keys have media controls including volume controls. This is a good spot for a function layer volume control because you can one hand the control. That said I still rarely ever use function layer volume controls. But will never be upset at having the option. The function layer up above those has led brightness up and down for the print screen and pause buttons. The function layer for the mode button is a function toggle. So you can lock the function layer on and play with your volume or brightness.

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It’s a small detail but in addition to the all blacked out look, I like that the only Wooting logo that isn’t on a keycap is down below the spacebar and is just embossed. Most companies would have backlit it or at least filled it in with white to make it super visible, but this clean look puts the customer first, not advertising the brand first.

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From the side profile, it looks like the Wooting One has an OEM or Filco keycap profile. The Flaretech switches are blacked out as well so they aren’t as visible as you would normally expect for a bezel-less design. The keyboard also has a small indented area on the sides here for a touch of style.

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So the bottom of the Wooting One has a lot going on for the bottom of a keyboard. For starters, they really went crazy with rubber feet and I love it. There are three along the front edge and then four along the back. Each is about an inch wide. Then there are two flip-out feet to angle the keyboard, those also have rubber feet on the end so you don’t lose too much grip when angled. The board does have a detachable cord if you didn’t see it in the packaging section. It attaches under the keyboard in a recessed area just like Filco and later Cooler Master have done. It connects with a Micro-USB connection allowing for you to replace the cord if it is damaged or if you just want to spice things up with a different sleeving.

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Also on the bottom in the middle is a sticker with the model and serial numbers as well as the normal certification and regulatory logos. What caught my eye though was down at the bottom of that sticker. The three guys from Wooting have their signatures with a note saying they made the Wooting one for you and to take care of her.

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Here is the included cord with its USB Type A connection on one end and Micro-USB on the other. It does have a black sleeving to go with the rest of the blacked out board.

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Okay, so I pulled a few keycaps off so we could get a better look at the business end of the board. These are the Flaretech optical switches. They don’t really look any different than other key switches, in fact, they have the same shape and form factor as a Cherry MX switch, all the way down to the location of the branding on top. There are Cherry stems up on top for keycap compatibility as well. There is a light tube up on top to pull the light from the surface mounted LED under the switch up into the keycaps, I like this better than going full transparent on the whole switch like the new Cherry MX switches do. Between that and the transparent stem, it gets the light up into the keycap without as much outer glow, with this being a bezel-less board that is important. Now the Wooting One does support removing the switches so we can get a good look up under everything as well. You can see the surface mounted LED right there at the top.

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So there are two switch types available, this clear looking model is the Linear55 aka a Cherry Red like feel. You get a 55cN actuation force with a linear travel all the way down the 4mm travel distance. Now they don’t list an actuation point because this is an analog setup and Wooting allows you to change the actuation point up or down in the software. The Flaretech switches are basically just dummy switches, the real work goes on up under the switch facing up into two small holes in the bottom of the switch. They do have a clicky model as well that they call the Clicky55 that is designed to be similar to a Cherry MX Blue. It has the same 55cN actuation force, 100,000,000 million click lifespan, and everything else. Just with the click. It has a transparent stem as well but you can see an orange color inside, that is how you can tell them apart. For the longer keys like the shift button, they do have stabilizers. They look to be similar to a Cherry style stabilizer meaning the bar is inside the keyboard between the two pegs with cherry stems on them. This makes swapping out keys much easier but can sometimes be a little noisier.

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Now for the keycaps, they didn’t go crazy or anything. They are your basic transparent ABS plastic keycaps. That means they are a transparent white then painted black with UV and protective coatings to keep it from wearing off too quickly, then the legends are etched off so the light shines through. The Wooting One is begging for a nice set of doubleshot PBT keycaps to really top things off, but that adds a LOT to the cost unless you are a huge name producing large volumes.

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While it doesn’t matter like it does with a mouse, I did also toss the Wooting One on the scale to see what it weighs. It came in at 1 pound 10.5oz or 752 grams. So it isn’t beat someone to death with your keyboard heavy, but you could at least do a little damage.

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Performance and Software

Normally for performance testing, I use a keyboard for about two weeks but with the Wooting One, I’ve had a lot more seat time than that. Other than the testing of a few other keyboards I’ve been using this full time for about two months. A majority of that time has been when working aka writing or browsing the internet and arguing with strangers. But I did get some gaming in. The reason for the delay though was because I haven’t recently been playing too many games that really take advantage of the analog. Sure I play League of Legends and Wooting even has some guidelines on how to set it up with it, but it was more just a way to integrate normal and quick casting into one key. A cool idea but it didn’t really fit with my playstyle. So I busted out my racing and shooting games eventually to get a better feel for things.

So initially figure out what profiles would work with each game was a little confusing. After searching around I did run into a website that people have submitted profile codes. These codes let you copy their profiles for those specific games. Check it out! With that for a few games and then basic controller support in others I got a few working. I spent most of my time in Project Cars though. I love my racing when I get a chance to do it, but because it is rare that I have the time I don’t keep my racing wheel at my desk or even a controller to plug in. So I was curious to see if an analog keyboard would be able to fill in that gap. What I found was that yes the analog worked and yes in a lot of ways it can handle the same functionality as a controller. It wasn’t perfect, the analog throw doesn’t start until 1.5mm into the 4mm throw so it takes a lot of getting used too to be able to use it. It actually reminds me a lot more of the analog buttons that the PlayStation. I really wish it was the entire throw, because that was really my only issue. I spent a lot of time toying with the analog profiles in the software to try to find what would work best, the slower engaging profiles helped but you still have all of that dead space. The biggest benefit to the analog control is you don’t have instant on and off with the gas and break, even if you aren’t trying to fine tune the controls, this alone makes driving games a lot easier on the keyboard. The instant on of a digital key makes it really hard at the edge of control with gas and brakes and even turning.

Swapping between the digital profile and the analog one was nice with the mode button. This is important because in a lot of games you might need to use both. Some of the GTAV profiles for example only worked when driving, not to mention if you need to type to someone.

When using the Wooting One for every day use it took a little getting used to on my part. I like a little feedback when typing, but I don’t like loud clicky keyboards. So the Linear55’s were still the best choice but without that feedback like an MX brown would give it felt a little mushy. The default activation point worked well for me, a lot of times when you have a quick activation point focusing on gaming I get a lot of typing mistakes. Considering I have to use my PC for work first and gaming second I personally can’t give up typing performance for gaming performance. But the Wooting One seemed to be a happy medium.

The Linear55’s do have a little more actuation force needed than a normal Cherry MX Red but they do have a smooth action. Well other than my letter J it for some reason has some scratchiness in it. I guess I should replace it with one of the included extras. The cherry like stabilizers had a touch of rattle when typing but when you shake the keyboard around they didn’t make any noise at all. I think a little more lubrication on them might help keep the typing rattle down. Now a lot of optical switches fight with more wobble and these aren’t any different. Putting a set of Cherry MX switches next to the Flaretechs and you can see about double the play. I didn’t notice it as much when typing as I did when grabbing a switch and tested it, but it is still important to note for those that are more sensitive to it.

Now the backlighting was something I mentioned a few times in my initial look at the keyboard design. I was a little concerned that the bezel-less design would have a light coming out around the keys. The black backplate helped keep things a little better. I did see a little but only at night. This is mostly because the surface mounted LED on the PCB shines up into a light tube in the switch, not into an all-clear switch that throws light out every direction. The lighting was good though, none of the keys had any dark areas in the legends and they were all bright. I was surprised that the function layer lighting controls had so much control as well. Normally a keyboard brightness control takes 4-6 clicks to get from bright to off but I think I counted 23 to do the same on the Wooting One. I like a little extra control but that might be too much lol.

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In addition to how well the keyboard works, there are other aspects that are important, especially with the Wooting One like how do you program it all. Well, Wooting had put a lot of time into their software that they call Wootility, like utility. So when you download and install it, the first thing it's going to do is let you know what is new. They are really active in their software upgrades, more so than most other companies even so it is nice to know what actually changed after each update.

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From there, it is going to prompt you to update the firmware on your keyboard. This was the update I got when I first installed the software. I did get another recently as well.

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So the software itself looks really simple and you just assume there isn’t a lot of functionality. But once you start looking around you will be surprised. Wooting has just made the software simple and easy to use without requiring 5 different tabs to sort everything or multiple programs running inside of other programs to control things like lighting. Basically, you have four profiles over on the left. These match the profiles the keyboard has currently. One is the digital profile, then there are three analog profiles. Then from there, every option is available just on one profile. The lighting is up top on all of them and you can basically pick any color and brightness level over on the right and apply it to any key. Or if you want there are lighting effects that they recently added, you can turn those on. Then each has different options like speed, brightness and other options that apply specifically to that effect. For example, the scan option lets you set the width of the scan or wave has different color patterns and you can pick the direction.

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Now the digital profile, beyond the lighting controls doesn’t really have a lot of programming options. I was expecting to be able to reprogram each key and to create macros and set them to a key but really you can just set the actuation point, and rebind some of the function keys if you want to move them. They actually hid this programming all in the analog mode. This is because if you program the main digital layer, then you lose your default typing layer. More than one digital profile would fix this issue. Look for the DKS settings on an analog page to program key bindings.  DKS lets you program two functions to one key depending on how far you push it down. Not exactly the only programming that I think you should have, but it is a cool and unique feature that is exclusive to a keyboard with full analog like the Wooting One.

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Now the analog mode, on the other hand, has all of that rebinding available. This is because every game is going to need different settings. You can program things in Xinput or Directinput. Xinput is the Xbox 360 controller API for windows. Most games these days will have support for this, but older games may use Directinput so it's nice to have both options. Each output can be programmed to any key. Then beyond that, you can set the analog curve to show how it will perform. There are defaults for this or you can move the dots on the map.

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Another aspect that I never thought I would care about is how Wooting eases you into the programming of their keyboard. When you buy the keyboard you are added to a mailing list. You, of course, get your shipping email, a thank you for buying it and so on. But later once you have your board you get two different emails. One walks you through the initial setup and how to get started. Then later they follow up with a second email and dive into more advanced configuration options.

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I mentioned Wooting being active in updating their software. But even more than that, they are really open about their development. Everything is tracked and available to see so you can check out upcoming features, features that are being considered, and what is being worked on right now.

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Overall and Final Verdict

After spending so much time with the Wooting One I really found myself loving Wooting as a company. It might seem trivial, but the way they approach customer service with the emails in stages to teach how things work, the small details in things like the packaging with a postcard than you can send them with a favor, and the signatures and note on the bottom of the keyboard. It is really clear that this is a labor of love for these guys, makes you wonder if they will cry with a few of the bad things I mention about the board as well. It’s okay guys! HUGS

That same love really shows in the software for the Wooting One. Most companies with just one board don’t even bother to make their own software. They just use and maybe reskin something basic. Even with the big names in the market, it is rare to see lots of big changes being made and getting full transparency in what is new, what is upcoming, and what they are considering. The software itself was easy to use and didn’t require a lot of pages or programs inside of programs, but I do hope to see more digital profiles in the future along with options for rebinding keys. Most of the software features really revolve around the analog leaving a few basic features that most keyboards with software have like macros missing.

The board has a clean look with the all blacked out theme and no in your face branding. I would like to see double shot keycaps for a little better quality, but at least this board has a standard layout so you can add your own later. The optical switches were good and I like the adjustable actuation point though there was still a little more wobble that I would like. But the big thing here is having full analog control. I love the idea and it did work well, especially in racing games where even if you don’t use it fully it takes away that jarring effect that a digital key does when you hit the gas/brake/steering. I do wish there wasn’t that big 1.5mm dead spot up at the top, without that I think the analog would be a lot more functional for me.

Overall though Wooting has something completely different going on here and it isn’t just a weird gimmick. Analog can allow for better control in your games when you can’t get a wheel or controller out. Some fine tuning with it, namely the dead spot, and I think it can be a full replacement for a controller. Especially given the level of control you get over the analog profiles and programmability. What really surprised me though was that Wooting is offering the One with these features and great software for less than what a lot of the big names are selling their boards. Having analog alone puts it ahead of most of those boards. Now of course if gaming isn’t your focus and you can’t think of any cool ways to use the analog in everyday use, then I do think they need to get some on switch stabilizers to make this better for writers and keyboard warriors. But for someone like me who writes then wants to game, it allowed me for the first time in a long time to enjoy some of the racing games that I like. Something I don’t like to do normally without a wheel. For me to use this every day at my main PC I would need a number pad, simply because I do a lot of graph inputting. But Wooting has that coming as well with the Wooting Two that is in Kickstarter for a few more days right now. I wonder if they would notice if I took one.

fv5recommended

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Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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