Arion Bluetooth Mini Keyboard with Speakerphone Review

Peter Donnell / 9 years ago

Final Thoughts

Price

The Arion Bluetooth Keyboard KB100B-BK seems in limited supply right now, the only listing for it being on eBay in America, but at $20 and a further $9 to ship it to the UK, it’s hardly expensive and actually very good value for money given the range of features on offer, although admittedly there are a lot of similar solutions on the market around the same price.

Overview

The Arion Bluetooth Keyboard is small, lightweight and very easy to use. If you need it at home, it’ll sit alongside your phone or your TV remotes, ready to pick up and use when you need it most. While I can’t see myself getting a lot of use from it, it’s a nice thing to have when you’re faced with searching streaming content applications on your console, TV or navigating your HTPC. It’s not a great keyboard overall, in fact it’s a little too small to be practical, but when compared to a small touch screen, arrow key or number key input from a remote control, or D-pad input on a console, it’s leaps and bounds ahead of any of them.

I could happily have this in my pocket or backpack without any ergonomic concerns, plus it’s cheap enough that I wouldn’t be too upset if it was lost or damaged. Build quality is pretty good, or at least as good as you would expect for a small plastic and rubber construction keyboard, so it should survive more than a few knocks and bumps without any issues.

The internal battery is infinite as far as I’m concerned. I charged it a month ago, have used it a couple of times a day, most days of the week and it’s still going strong. Of course, I would expect heavy use of the speakerphone function to put an increased drain on the device, but there’s really no practical reason to rely on this feature day-to-day, so that’s unlikely to become an issue for you.

The multi-format support is easily the biggest selling point here, being able to connect to virtually any Bluetooth enabled device and with all the major function keys in place to help you navigate each of them.

Pros

Highly portable
Affordable price
Good build quality
All major functions easily accessible via Fn-shift
Rechargeable
Built-in speakerphone
Long battery life

Cons

Too small to be practical vs a regular keyboard or some touch screens, such as those on tablets
Microphone is too sensitive
Retail availability is limited

“If you need a small, easy to use keyboard with support for multiple devices, then the Arion keyboard is certainly worth considering. It’s perfect for controlling your media center, HTPC or games console text input and it’s certainly easier than trying to type using a D-pad on PlayStation.”