Belkin n52te Tournament Edition SpeedPad
by Belkin Components
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List Price: Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
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for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Belkin n52te Tournament Edition SpeedPad
Customer Review: great product
Summary: 5 Stars
this was a great buy. works great and is very stylish. this is the first gamepad i have ever purchased and i have to say i am very impressed with the quality and the control it offers. would definitely recommend this to friends.Customer Review: Great for gaming...
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this mostly for first person shooters and it's been great so far... I can't say it's improved my gaming at all but it's MUCH more comfortable than using the left side of a keyboard.Customer Review: VERY GOOD
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this product is the best thing that you have invented. Im really happy with this. you will do sell a mouse belkin for games is a good option.Customer Review: Has some issues . . . but recommended
Summary: 4 Stars
**Overview
After shopping around for a few weeks, I finally settled on this pad. While it took a few days to get used to, I found myself preferring it immensely to a normal keyboard while playing World of Warcraft. In the case of first person shooters though, I didn't find it to be a huge improvement over my $10 dell keyboard.
Unfortunately, after about five months of persistent usage, the top-right key (equivalent to the 'r' key on a normal keyboard) stopped functioning and required some jury-rigging to revive. As of this date, the key works for the most part, but fails to register strokes with enough frequency to prompt me to shelve the gamepad.
In a nutshell:
*is it worth $60?
-Probably not. It probably cost $4 bucks for some chinese kid to make this.
*is it the best gaming pad out there?
-The evidence points to the original n52 as being the best
*is the original n52 still available?
-No, so its irrelevant to these reviews. Stop talking about it!
*is the n52te better than your $10 dell keyboard?
-yes
*will the n52te make you a better player?
-if you spend the time to get used to it yes. Its a fairly large control scheme shift with a correspondingly long learning curve.
*did the n52te break?
-yes, but only after I enjoyed using it for 5 months
*will I buy another one?
-possibly
**Ergonomics and Layout
This is definitely one of the stronger points of the gamepad. Unlike most of the other pads out there, this one actually looks like it was designed to have a hand placed on it. The palm rest provides nice support and guides your hand into a graceful position--unlike the claw I frequently find my hand in with a normal keyboard. And while the n52te doesn't have the bajillions of buttons that other comparable pads have, you'll find that you can press all of them without having to move your wrist up and down which greatly decreases hand strain. And honestly, with the exception of a very small number of games, theres little use in having more buttons than the n52te provides as long as you set it up intellegently.
However, it does have some knuckleheaded design choices. First being the placement of the space key. If you insist on using the d-pad, you'll find that the tip of your thumb is extended far past the space key thus requiring that you strike the far corner of it with the knuckle of your thumb. While I did not have the experience that other reviewers have reported of the key not registering if you don't hit it dead in the middle, the space key on my pad did have kind of the sticky feeling if it was pushed off-center. This was really not a huge problem though as the key layouts I used never required the heavy use of both the d-pad and the space bar simultaneously.
Another thing I didn't like about the design was the shoddy quality of the d-pad. If you see the analog stick and think that you're actually getting an analog pad, don't be fooled. Right out of the box I tried using it with the stick on, but wound up trashing it after about 10 minutes. It only served to make a d-pad that felt squishy even more unresponsive. Really it's just a crummy old digital pad akin to the one on that off-brand super nintendo controller you bought because it was 15 bucks cheaper than the real thing. Sure you could move Mario with it, but it just never felt right. Furthermore, they made it too big. Normally with a d-pad, I expect to be able to to keep my thumb in the middle and be able to pivot it in the appropriate direction. With this pad, I have to lift up my thumb and put it back down on the desired direction. And that just feels clunky to me. This, by the way, is my greatest disappointment with the n52te. I think its a great idea to give more control to your most dexterous digit which has tragically been relegated to merely making your character hop, but the d-pad on this thing just doesn't feel right.
Aside from the thumb area though, the other keys work fine. They have a slighty rough texture which, as a one with sweaty hands, is quite nice. I've seen some people here complaining about the backlight, as for me, I could take it or leave it. I play in a pretty well lit room so I just turn it off. However if you're the type that has trouble guzzling mountain dew, eating cheetos, and playing WoW in the complete darkness of your mother's basement, it might be a handy replacement for a desk lamp.
Last note on this subject . . . I have no idea why they decided to add a scroll wheel to this thing. If you don't already have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you have no business buying this pad. It doesn't really get in the way which is nice and I've occasionally used it for an extra 3 buttons (you can rebind scroll up/down to any keystroke or macro) but its presence is almost entirely superfluous.
**Software and Macros
I hear a lot of people bitching about how it doesn't have this feature or that doodad from the old version so its not worth buying, but I've found it to be completely adequate. The interface might not be great, it took me maybe an hour or so to get everything set up exactly the way I wanted it with some trial and error. But once its set up the way you want it, there little reason to be screwing with it anymore. Granted though, I didn't do anything crazy with the macro editor, I essentially just added 10 Hz turbo mode to some of my keys (a very nice feature in WoW). If you're looking to press one key down and have the controller go through 15 abilities, things may get a little dicey. But screw it, learn to play.
The most legitimate complaint I've seen about the software is the ability to have only 3 firmware keymaps. I personally only use two of them, one for WoW, and another for first-person shooters, I just alter the keybinds in individual games to match up with my general FPS keymap. I can see that some people out there would want to have more than these three keymaps, but keep in mind, these are only the firmware keymaps, ie. the ones that are stored in the controller so you can bring it over to your friends house and change the mapping. If you need more than three maps, the software gives you the option of saving a key layout and loading it back up at a later date. Effectively allowing you as many maps as you'd like. And as far as bringing this thing over to your friends house, if you're nerdy enough to have to take this everywhere you go, you're not above bringing along a usb drive with all your keymaps anyways.
**In-game Performance
In my opinion this pad really shines in games like World of Warcraft. That is, games where you have one entire buttload of spells and abilities, but super-precise movement is not necessary. While there's a lot of different ways to set it up, I found that the best configuration for my warrior tank was to bind movement to the d-pad and bind all of my abilities to the keys under my index through ring finger with the pinky in charge of ability sheet swapping (alt, shift, ctrl). Granted you have to be very comfortable with mouse moving for this to work, but it gives you full access to all the abilities and macros you'd ever want to use while maintaining constant control over the movement of your character. And since it allows you to have your hand on the mouse at all times, you no longer need to employ the dreaded and nubbish tab-targetting. The only caveat though is that since my thumb is on the d-pad all the time, physically hitting the space bar while moving forward is next to impossible, so I bound jump to one of the side buttons of my mouse (a logitech MX518) which worked out fine. The space key I wound up rebinding to open up my inventory which worked out quite nicely. It took me a few days to get used to this new setup and chances are it will for you too, but don't be discouraged, it will make you a far better player.
As far as first person shooters go, some of the utility of this pad diminishes. Since the d-pad is way to spongey to control movement, I found myself reverting to the old WASD scheme. Which feels nice enough, however theres one big problem here, the pad has no keys that correspond to the number buttons, so you'll either have to cycle through the weapons with your scroll wheel, or be fairly creative with your keybinding. I wound up binding my guns to the cardinal directions of the d-pad, but if you have more than four, then you start to run into trouble. Honestly its not a huge problem if you've got a mouse with some buttons to take up the slack (I use the side buttons on my mouse for grenades and such) but if you want to play a game like ARMA II which has literally every key on the keyboard bound plus ctrl-bound plus alt-bound, you'll need to go back to a full sized keyboard. So if you only play first person shooters, I recommend getting a full-sized gaming keyboard. You'll probably be happier with that in the long run.
**Durability
As I mentioned at the top I had the "r" key fail after about 5 months. I was playing an FPS and noticed that my gun wouldn't reload anymore. I opened it up (fairly easy to get inside of with a small phillips screwdriver) and noticed that when I had its guts splayed out on my desk the 'r' key started working again. Thinking that I had just sovled the problem by happenstance, I proceeded to screw the whole thing back together only to find that, when put back together, the key had stopped working again. My best guess was that there was some FOB in the housing that was causing a short when it was screwed together tightly. So I took it apart again and cleaned it pretty thourougly only to find that the key was still broken. Uhg.
So I wound up determining the exactly point of the housing reassemblage before the key stopped working. Turns out that when the portion of the housing nearest the ctrl key pressed into its seat all the way, it caused the 'r' key to bug out. After spending an unfruitful half hour trying to figure out why this was, I wound up jamming a shim made out of a folded up piece of cardstock between the two halves of the housing and screwing it back together sans a few screws.
This worked for a while until I noticed that the 'r' key stopped working when the ctrl key was depressed (no more crouching and reloading). Which was where I decided to just give up on it.
You might think that I'd be angry that it broke, but honestly, I put it through a lot of abuse. I'm not the kind of guy that chucks my keyboard across the room in a fit of rage, but I can get slightly heavy handed in the heat of the moment. I even spilled a beer on it once to no immediate ill-effect (was a bit sticky to the touch for a bit though). It is worth pointing out that my $10 dell keyboard has lasted almost two years though and shows no signs of quitting (and its filled with even MORE beer).
So yes, the life-cycle on this device is somewhat shorter than I would have liked. But it wasn't broken out of the box which was . . . nice.
Customer Review: Very nice, there are a few missing features though
Summary: 4 Stars
Picked up this sweet, sweet controller. One of the things that has always bothered me about MMOs is the sheer number of abilities jobs/classes/whatever the hell you want to call them have, and how practical it is for us as humans to access them when it's vital. We only have so many fingers, ya know? This really comes into play when PvP is introduced, where split-second timing is incredibly important. It doesn't do anybody a lot of good to have spell interruption abilities if you can't find the right Ctrl-Shift+Number key fast enough to use it before your face is melted off with a fiery blast.
So with that in mind I went on a quest to find a controller that would meet my needs. I wanted something that I could rapidly mash buttons on in a way that wouldn't require me to have to hunt them down visually, so being able to place my fingers strategically on the device was a must. It would also have to fit on the smallish slide-out keyboard tray that my desk has, and easily share the space with my mouse, which also sits on the keyboard tray. It would have to have enough buttons to make the most useful abilities my class has a button-push away. I had originally thought that a device which mimicked MMO ability bars would be perfect (something like 2 or 3 rows of very large buttons that you could smack, mounted above a keyboard.) However, that wouldn't be practical for a lot of MMO games which rely heavily on abilities, WAR being one of them. So I dropped that idea (such an accessory doesn't exist anyway) and moved on to browsing through pages of controllers.
I examined gaming keyboards as well as gaming mice. I decided to get a new mouse, as the one I had was just a standard 3 button mouse, and picked up a Razor DeathAdder. Great mouse, extremely sensitive, good feel, but holy crap I was in the usersettings.xml changing the mouse sensitivity faster than a grasshopper jumping off a hot skillet. Even the slightest mouse movement caused my screen to whip around so fast I almost fell out of my chair. I digress, however. One of the top rated controllers was the n52te. I read the feedback from users on this one, as well as other highly rated controllers, and the n52te, while disappointing to people who owned the original n52, had good reviews from people who had never owned the older version. I took a chance and bought it, because it looked like it might meet my needs.
A couple of days later it was in my hands; yesterday, as a matter of fact. Plugged it in, went to the website and downloaded the latest drivers, and away I went. Placing my hand on it I knew that ergonomically it was fairly well thought out with the placement of the various buttons, as well as the thumb hat switch. There are a few buttons that are just not practical, depending on how you use the controller. The way I use it is the thumb hat switch controls movement, and the buttons laid out on the top row are for the most commonly used abilities. The second row is for debuffs, and the third row (which is pretty awkward to use, requiring the user to have to curl their fingers up to reach) is morale abilities since they're used infrequently. The mouse is used for camera panning, and the mouse wheel is used for jumping. The right mouse button is held in almost all of the time to facilitate camera panning. The middle button is assigned to jumping, and the easiest to use side button cycles through enemies, while the button next to it targets the nearest enemy.
It took a bit to get used to moving around with my thumb instead of WASD keyboard input, and getting a feel for where the buttons are for abilities is something I'm still getting comfortable with. However, the potential for rapidly and intuitively selecting abilities is really obvious. Once this controller becomes second nature to operate, woe be unto Order!
Now for the cons.
- The buttons directly above and below the thumb hat switch are next to useless when using the thumb switch to move your character around. When you're running an enemy down, you certainly aren't going to take your thumb off the direction controls to try to press one, otherwise the enemy will be out of range or worse, strafing around you pwning your face. As a result, they're assigned to really infrequent tasks. Namely bringing up the map, and I don't think I even have the bottom button assigned to anything at all.
- The hat switch doesn't depress to act like another button. This is such a HUGE miss on Belkin's part. Why? Because the controller has the capacity to operate in 3 different modes, each one mapping to different sets of keys. This means that all of the character abilities that could be accessed with regular number keys, ctrl+number keys, and alt+number keys could have been selected if a hat switch button was present to cycle through the different modes. As a matter of fact, as far as I know, there's no way to cycle through the different modes using the controller! I could be wrong (and probably am), but looking through the documentation it never mentioned how to map a key to cycle through modes. The point is, being able to cycle through different abilities using a hat switch button would enable the user to continue moving around while selecting upwards of 42 abilities! As it stands, the controller relegates its users to only 14, which is still really REALLY freakin' nice, but I can't help but think about how awesome it would be to have access to 42.
- The controller's key mapping editor. It's HORRIBLE. Apparently they thought it would be a good idea to use some fancy graphics which doesn't scale at all on large resolution displays. So, if you're like me and run at a high resolution, good luck trying to read all that tiny text. The way the help is integrated into the editor is also horrible. HORRIBLE! It has these bizarre slide-outs that allow a user to interact with the index and subjects. You just have to see it to understand how bad it is. Couple it with high resolutions and it's made of pure fail. Also, the fact that you can only map a SINGLE key, as opposed to key combinations, to a button is retarded. I'm sure if you delve into making a macro you can use key combos, but why the hell can't I just do it in an easy fashion? Overall, the editor is clunky, ugly, and incredibly counter-intuitive.
- The rows of buttons aren't spaced far enough away from one another. I think it would have made people a lot happier if the buttons were a bit smaller so the spacing between them would be distinctive enough to know which button is which when feeling for a selection. As it stands there's not enough room to really know which buttons your fingers are aligned with without having to glance if you've moved your fingers for whatever reason. It would also help if the buttons were more concave, to really give a user good tactile feedback that their fingers are centered on them.
That's about it. Overall it's a great controller, and if and when they fix that god-awful editor it will be a hell of a lot better. That missing hat switch button is truly a huge oversight on their part though, and one that can't be fixed without a new revision of the device itself, unfortunately.