Cooler Master Reveals QuickFire Rapid-i Mechanical Keyboard
Meet Cooler Master's newest keyboard, the QuickFire Rapid-i.
Cool Master decided to jump in on all the excitement of Microsoft Build week with an announcement of its own. The company today announced the QuickFire Rapid-i, a full featured back-lit mechanical keyboard.

The QuickFire Rapid-i runs on a 32-bit ARM processor and Rapid-i’s ActivLite Technology, and includes five lighting modes and five brightness levels. These modes include the ability to have each key illuminate on each key press and fade as you move away from the specific keys. There’s also multimedia shortcuts and NKRO. According to Cooler Master, the QuickFire Rapid-i boasts a 1ms response time in USB mode.
No word on availability or price just yet, but we’ll keep you posted as soon as we hear anything from our friends at Cooler Master.
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These aren't even the worse things.
The function layer is almost completely useless. They don't have a single function key in the main portion of the keyboard. Instead they keep media controls to the right of it, and I assume what are macro keys (M1-M4) far beyond the reach of a normal hand. Since there's only the one fn button you can't use these keys while using your keyboard normally at all.
I don't see people buying this keyboard.
So it doesn't have the arrow at the end, so that makes it "nonstandard" or not descriptive? Everyone knows what the damn enter key is.
This is a logical design decision. If you have them in the standard layout, because of where the LED is on mechanical switches for the backlighting (which can't be moved because mechanical switch is in the way), you would light up only the secondary functions on the number row, and not the actual number, which Coolermaster seems to believe is the more important item to backlight.
http://img542.imageshack.us/img542/5851/img20130108234722.jpg
See above from Corsair's mechanical keyboard. The secondary functions are lit but the numbers are not. CM is merely flipping it to provide backlight to what they believe is the more relevant information.
http://content.hwigroup.net/images/products/xl/185886-5.jpg
Same keyboard, switches removed. This is how all backlit mechanical keyboards look under the caps.
Razer took the same approach as CM:
http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/RazerBlackWidow1.jpg
Notice the numbers are inverted, because they actually get backlit that way.
I did notice that, he was addressing the numbers though, not the before and after, so that's why I mentioned it. I do think it's a bit odd that they wouldn't flip them too, as Razer obviously did with theirs, but overall has very little consequence. I almost never look at my keyboard when I type, even to use the number row, so it's of little impact to me what way they want to print it on there, all of my keys could be blank and it wouldn't effect me, unless you started rewiring all the keys ;P