Keyboards. Outwardly they're pretty dull: all blocks of plastic with a hundred or so keys on them. Yet hardware manufacturers still find interesting angles to pursue with them... we were recently sent a prototype predictive keyboard from Microsoft which reads the electromagnetic fields off your fingers and anticipates which words you're going to type next. It's very clever. Windows rules! We're using it right now. Linux is pants. Slick technology indeed. Bill Gates for president.

And back to reality... We're actually typing this review on the K2 keyboard, of course, and the surprising thing is that considering it's designed for gaming, it's actually very comfortable for general purpose use. It has a sturdy feel, both in terms of the overall build quality and the key action. The latter is soft and pleasant to the touch without veering off into the dangerous territory of being spongy. Judging this sort of thing is subjective, naturally, but unless you're a real fan of the clackier boards, you're likely to appreciate the K2.

The soft action isn't a typing design, however, but a gaming one, as the keys are produced with a shallow keystroke for maximum responsiveness when saving the world with a sub-machinegun or carving the innards out of a dragon with a bloody great spiky axe.

The K2 doesn't have a specifically gamer-oriented layout: there are no additional banks of gaming keys or anything like that. It features a standard configuration, with a numeric pad on the right and eight multimedia buttons (for volume, mute, Web browser and so forth). However, the one major difference is that the surface area of the keys is 20 percent bigger than a normal board.

So how does all this translate when actually playing a game? The responsiveness of the keys doesn't make any discernible difference, but the larger surface area means that you're less likely to miss a key when stabbing at it in the heat of battle. The slightly chunkier keys also mean that your fingers sit more comfortably on top of WASD (or whichever keys you play with).

As well as this, the K2's keys are also slightly lower profile, like a sports car's tyres, and this is most noticeable when reaching for the left shift or control keys with the little finger. It's much easier to hit these than with a normal board, where left control in particular tends to be slightly raised.

A small but ergonomically snug wrist rest completes the physical package, and again it's quite low profile to fit with the slope of the keyboard. One slight negative is that the wrist rest is rather light and plasticky and attached a little loosely to the main unit, but the important thing is that it sits still when you've got your wrists on it. Also, the K2's function keys are rather small, but these are minor moans.

On the software side, a program called Raptor-Load gives the user access to various programmable functions via a neat interface. Keys can be reconfigured, so you can remap buttons even if a particular game's interface won't let you, and it's also possible to map multiple key presses or sequences to a single button. Different configurations can be created for every game you own and these can be saved and switched between at will.

Raptor-Load is a simple and slick affair which adds a great deal of flexibility to defining game controls. For example, in an RPG we were playing at the time of this review, we were able to load the hotkeys for two commonly used potions together onto the 'E' key, so with a quick press of this both pots were quaffed in sequence.

The Raptor K1 was this keyboard's predecessor and it came with a few flash extras like a bank of eight glowing keys you could see in the dark and a guarantee of a 50 million key press tolerance. This model is only guaranteed to 20 million - we say "only", but that's still well above average - and there's a three year warranty which is good enough for us. The other major difference is that the K1 costs £80 or so, and with the K2 at less than half that, it makes for an affordable quality gaming keyboard.

The K2 is comfortable for normal typing duties and well ergonomically tailored for gaming. The programmable features are very useful and the price is keen for a quality peripheral.