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There’s no shortage of affordable keyboards in the world, many of them wireless, so what makes the Dell Pro Wired Collaboration Keyboard so special? The answer is simple: it knows exactly who it’s aimed at and solves their problems.
There are other reasons too. One, wired keyboards are simply less hassle than wireless options. No battery life worries, no fiddling around with Bluetooth or USB dongles. Plug this keyboard in and start typing: Dell helps by fixing the USB-C to USB-A adapter onto the cable.
Aside from lost dongles, Dell is aiming to solve the problem of daily conference calls. Designed for users of Microsoft Teams and Zoom, when a call begins the four collaboration keys at the top right spring into life.
These then act as visual cues for whether your mic and camera are active: white if yes, red if no. Naturally, you can then use them to switch from one state to another.
The other two keys are shortcuts for sharing your screen and activating the chat mode. Easy. Note that you can’t reprogram these buttons (unlike top-row buttons on the keyboard), but you can deactivate them. More on that below.
When it comes the Dell Pro Wired Collaboration Keyboard’s typing action, I don’t have anything special to report. It’s a pretty standard action, with no great depth of “feel” to boast about. However, I’m fussy about my keyboards and have used this happily as my main input device for several weeks. It just works.
Perhaps its best feature is that the action is very nearly silent. You would have to really bang your fingers down to make such a racket to annoy a neighbour in the office.
It helps that Dell doesn’t make any silly decisions over key placement or sizing. The Copilot key slots in gracefully between a Fn button and the right Ctrol key, and you don’t lose the Alt Gr key or any width from the space bar. Add a double-height Return key and large character keys, with a subtle contoured top to guide your fingers, and I made fewer typos than usual.
A dedicated number pad sits to the right, and again Dell makes no compromise in terms of layout or size of the keys.
When you plug your keyboard in for the first time you’ll be prompted to install Dell Display and Peripheral Manager. This is a handy utility that allows you to control – you probably guessed this – any connected Dell displays and peripherals. Along with keyboards, these could be mice and webcams.
It’s a well-designed piece of software that here allows you to program the function keys. There’s nothing ground-shaking here, but I do appreciate the ability to customise my keyboard as I see fit.
Dell organisations the shortcuts into four main areas of Suggested Actions, Productivity Actions, Windows Actions and Multimedia Actions.
There are four Suggested Actions. The first is to assign a keystroke (such as Shift + Ctrl + C), none (a little weirdly), open a file or open a folder. Productivity actions include Back, minimize or maximize window, copy, cut and many more.
Windows Actions are predictable enough: think shortcuts for hiding the desktop, launching Settings or sending the computer to sleep. And the Multimedia actions are so predictable – pause, play, volume, next track – that they are barely worth mentioning.
Dell does quote an official price for this keyboard, but constantly offers discounts so it isn’t reflective of what you’ll spend. In the UK, that price is £34 exc VAT (£41 including VAT), while US customers see a list price of $39.99.
As I write this, those prices are actually £31 inc VAT and $24.99. While Americans definitely get the better deal, even in the UK that’s an excellent price for a high-quality keyboard with hassle-saving features.
