The Cyborg sounds like it should be half keyboard, half man; a hybrid artificially intelligent creation. Sort of like KITT out of Knight Rider but with no wheels (or turbo boost), it could auto-target enemies in first-person shooters, reload your gun when necessary and hit an appropriate taunt button every time you dusted someone ("Eat that n00b!", "Pwnage", or some other mangled vowel insult).

It doesn't do this, sadly, but the Cyborg certainly looks as if it came from the eighties rather than the future its name suggests. The chunky retro styling won't be to everyone's taste and we think it veers a little too far towards ugly. That's even though Saitek has attempted to make it a bit groovier with a silver coloured spacebar and WASD keys, which are apparently metal-coated.

This is actually a neat idea as it means these most-used keys are hard wearing (though we've never worn out any of the keys on a desktop keyboard). And it isn't the only novel aesthetic tweak Saitek has given the Cyborg; there's also a backlighting system. Using a touch-sensitive panel at the top of the keyboard, you can change the colour of the backlight (between red, orange, yellow and light or dark green) and its brightness.

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Cleverly, you can light different sections of the Cyborg with different colours. We turned the main keyboard neon green and the WASD keys bright red to make them stand out even more. To be honest this is a bit gimmicky, but the important thing is the brightness setting goes up to a decent level so you can clearly make out keys in the dark. (And come December you can join in the festivities by lighting up your keyboard like a Christmas tree).

The keyboard itself employs a standard layout, the major addition being the touch-sensitive panel which boasts media controls alongside the backlighting buttons. The Cyborg also has two banks of six function keys on the left- and right-hand sides, and these are programmable using the supplied SST (Saitek Smart Technology) software. This allows you to program multiple key-presses to any function key and save different profiles for various games.

Another useful extra is the inclusion of a USB extension port on the side of the keyboard, alongside a sound card and microphone pass-through. It comes with a nice chunky wrist rest, too. The most disappointing facet of the Cyborg is that the keys themselves seem a little plasticky, and while they're not particularly difficult to type with, they don't have a very satisfying feel to their typing action.

It's a touch plasticky for the money Saitek's asking, but the Cyborg is a reasonable gaming keyboard with an interesting line in coloured illumination.