The Logitech K400 Plus Wireless Touch Keyboard ($27.99) has been floating around for the better part of a decade. It's a wireless keyboard and touchpad in one unit, designed for connecting to a home theater PC or any other device to which it would be inconvenient to connect twin wired (or even wireless) peripherals. Unfortunately, its quality reflects its price. It’s no fun to type on; it can't be used in a darkened room due to a lack of backlighting; and it doesn’t support Bluetooth, limiting the number of everyday gadgets you can connect it to. Few keyboards out there still serve the niche it does, which helps explain its longevity. But if you're in the market for one, shop around for comparable models with Bluetooth, backlighting, or both, or stretch your budget to a higher-quality alternative such as the Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard.
Keeping It Basic and Cheap
On a single chassis, the Logitech K400 Plus packs a tight little keyboard and a modestly sized touchpad to the right of it. The whole thing is built from a cheap-feeling plastic, from the keycaps to the frame to the mouse buttons. The plastic finish is slightly rough, and it's not especially sturdy, with the keyboard flexing under even a bit of pressure. The touchpad surface is the only outlier, much stiffer and smoother than the key area.
While the alphabet and number keys are sized consistently, the rest of the keyboard features a lot of shrunken-down keys that can make typing tedious. Worse are the actual key switches, which allow for a lot of key wiggle and wobble. They’re worse than the most basic scissor switches you’ll come across. The space bar is the worst offender; pressing it near the bottom edge drags the key along the frame, creating enough resistance to prevent it from depressing, even with firm taps. With the frequent typos this causes, the small Backspace and Delete keys are that much more frustrating.
In testing, I was able to complete setup and start typing fairly quickly on this keyboard, but I struggled to get close to 100 words per minute in the web-based Monkeytype analyzer, and my accuracy was extra-low. Note: That test involves no capitalization or punctuation. In typing up this review on the K400 Plus, the frequency of typos and the tedium of correction was amplified.
To be fair, this keyboard isn’t really positioned for typing up essays and novels. (Don’t try to game on it, either: Its low, two-key rollover will frustrate those efforts.) Instead, it’s better positioned as a quick stand-in for a proper input device when you need something more functional than an onscreen virtual keyboard, especially for a home theater PC. The K400 Plus even has handy volume keys above the touchpad for this use case, though without key backlighting, it's not ideal for movie night in a darkened living room.
The inclusion of the touchpad makes this an all-in-one unit that can sit in your lap and tackle various PC navigation tasks. Four rubber feet at the corners help hold the keyboard in place, even when you're resting it on your legs. The design also lends itself to being held somewhat like a game controller, using one thumb to swipe around the touchpad and the other thumb to tap the cleverly placed right-click button in the top left corner of the keyboard. This controller-style grip is something I’ve seen implemented more cleverly on the far superior (though far pricier) Corsair K83 Wireless.
The Logitech K400 Plus is slim and lightweight, so it’s easy enough to tuck away when not in use. The keyboard uses Logitech’s handy Unifying Receiver, which can support multiple Logitech devices while occupying just a single USB Type-A port on the host device.
Curiously, the keyboard has a number of apparent Android function keys, but it doesn’t support Bluetooth—the obvious choice for connecting to most any Android device. The lack of Bluetooth support is a big negative, because a lot of the K400 Plus' competition, including the ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard, offers Bluetooth alongside a USB connection. As a consolation prize for the puzzling lack of Android-friendliness, the keyboard's function keys do work well in Windows, at least.
Without any backlighting or any lights at all—not even a battery or power-status indicator—the two AA batteries powering this K400 Plus don’t have a lot of power consumption to contend with. That likely contributes to Logitech's claim of an excellent 18-month battery life. Still, it's worth repeating that a home theater keyboard should have backlighting.
Customization: Limited, But Available
There’s not a lot to customize on the Logitech K400 Plus, but the Logitech Options utility provides a simple and effective means of editing what the function keys do. It also has settings for the touchpad, including changing the scrolling direction and enabling a few basic multi-touch gestures.
We've tested the Options app with many other Logitech keyboards, with varying verdicts. With the K400 Plus, the settings that the Options app offers are not very robust, but they could still be handy for a home theater PC. And since you ought not be gaming with this keyboard, its lack of macros shouldn’t be too upsetting.
Verdict: Simple and Affordable, But Outclassed
The low price of the K400 Plus should help us overlook the poor quality, to some degree, but it can’t when there are similar, better-built keyboard-and-touchpad combos out there. We picked up this Arteck model for around $30, and it’s better than the K400 Plus in nearly every way, adding Bluetooth into the mix while still offering a dedicated wireless dongle, even if it's not Logitech’s handy Unifying Receiver. Though we haven’t tested it (and given Microsoft is headed out of the non-Surface input-device business, we won't), the Microsoft All-in-One Media Keyboard is another similar option that looks like it steers clear of the poor keys Logitech has used here. Finally, stretching your budget will get you to much better options, including the excellent ThinkPad TrackPoint keyboard.
