ROUGH BUT REASONABLE

Mancomp is the latest company to enter the highly competitive add-on keyboard market for the Spectrum. Its MO184 keyboard is attractively styled but unfortunately its looks are deceptive.

The casing is large, and has a cut-out for the power supply and an indent at the top to hold a pen. The black top half is constructed from glass fibre; that makes cutting it or screwing the base to it difficult unless you have muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The green base, is made of an indeterminable material, rather brittle around the screw holes. To fit a Spectrum the top half of its case is removed and the bottom half fitted to the base. It is held by two plastic tabs at the front - barely adequate, especially if an Interface 1 is fitted. There is nothing between the Spectrum PCB and the keyboard PCB, a potentially dangerous state of affairs. When fitting Interface 1 a slot for the microdrive lead will have to be cut in the casing.

The keyboard has the usual forty keys, although the bottom row is not offset as in the standard QWERTY layout, plus extra ones. On the right is a numeric pad with an extra Enter and single function Full Stop. The main pad has two extra Caps Shifts, in yellow, and one extra Symbol Shift, in red. There is also a Break key and four cursor keys, in green, placed either side of the full size space bar, which all require shifting. The legends are stuck on but are due to be replaced with directly printed ones.

You will either like the feel of the keys or not. The tops occasionally foul the switches, depending on where you press them.

Provided you are prepared to spend some time working on it the keyboard could be made reasonable, but it costs £54.95 and there are many others within the same price range with much more going for them. For further information contact Mancomp Ltd, FREEPOST, Manchester M19 3BR. Tel: 061-224-1888.

THE KEY TO SUCCESS

This is an impressive looking piece of equipment, one of the largest keyboards I've seen.

The keys themselves have top quality switches with flat topped square plastic pads. At the moment the legends are stick on labels with larger than usual writing, very bright and easy to read, but the company tell me they are considering having them specially printed on the plastic.

A keypad is included on the right of the main board and a single entry full stop key has been added to it making numerical data entry easier. The main keys have a full sized space bar, double sized ENTER key, yellow caps shift and two extra of these keys, and extra cursor keys in bright green pairs at each side of the bottom of the keyboard. These keys have a very positive feel but tended to catch if not pressed centrally.

A hole in the top right of the case allows the power pack to be held inside the case and making for a much neater, more compact unit. The front of the case is angled and this makes it comfortable to use as it is just right for resting your wrists on when typing.

To install your Spectrum you remove the top of its case, place it in position in the new case, screw down two halves of the case together. An Interface 1 can also be included in the case.

When tightening one of the retaining clips a small chip of fibreglass broke off and the screw would not grip and so the Spectrum base was left to wallow around inside the case.

Mancomp told me that it had found favour among teachers and so I tested it in a school where the pupils were very computer orientated and used to handling this kind of equipment.

Perhaps I had a faulty keyboard and maybe it was coincidence but on Tuesday it was installed, Thursday the keys started falling off and on Friday the Spectrum died. End of test, end of Spectrum, end of review.