Logitech K830 review

The K830 is an updated version of the TK820, and like that keyboard is designed to be used with a home theatre PC. To this end it has a built-in touchpad alongside the keyboard, so you can control your PC easily from your sofa.

The K830’s design is considerably different to that of the TK820. It’s more compact, has a built-in rechargeable battery rather than the TK820’s AA cells, and has separate touchpad buttons, a dedicated volume control and backlit keys to make the keyboard easier to use in the dark.

All these are distinct advantages; being able to just charge the keyboard over USB rather than have to fiddle about with separate batteries is a bonus, and we usually find it easier to use separate touchpad buttons than to click the whole pad, especially when performing actions such as clicking and dragging to move or copy files or folders.

However, we feel the keyboard itself has been compromised to make these changes. The more compact design means the keys are more crammed in, so there’s more change of mistyping, and we didn’t like the keys’ action anywhere near as much as on the TK820; the precise click has been replaced with a slightly spongy action and some flex in the keyboard’s base. It’ll be fine for typing in names of YouTube videos, but you may tire of the action when typing a long email.

The touchpad has a good smooth surface and predictable cursor movement, and the buttons a good positive click. You can set up Logitech’s software to enable or disable gestures such as pinch-to-zoom or swiping in from the sides to switch applications in Windows 8; the gestures work well, but we found we would sometimes catch the touchpad with our little finger, causing an accidental application switch.

The Logitech K830 is a perfectly reasonable keyboard for an HTPC, but the cheaper TK820 is far superior when it comes to typing.