Mistel Airone Black Mechanical Keyboard

If you like a slim compact keyboard the cheap plastic bluetooth keyboards with scissor or membrane keys are all that's available. But I just discovered the Mistel Airone. I had to ship it from Taiwan. It's worth it. It's an extremely solid screwed together platform despite being the thinnest keyboard on the planet. There are some compromises for compactness, but the use of Cherry ultra-low profile mechanical keys puts this keyboard in a league all of it's own.

The Airone uses Cherry MX ultra-low profile *mechanical* keys. It's hard to overstate how good these keys are, especially if you're only used to scissor or membrane keys, which are the norm on slim keyboards. The keys are what sets this keyboard apart - although they do a great job on the other areas of the keyboard as detailed below.

These are very low profile keys, as low as on any scissor key keyboard, but they respond like mechanical keys, because they *are* mechanical keys. So you don't have the massive height or any wobbly feel that you might dislike in a full size keyboard but they still have the gentle resistance and clear definition of a mechanical key press.

Currently, for me, I don't know a better keyboard. There are some other pros and cons as follows.

It's hard to get a keyboard without bluetooth these days. The Airone has a detachable USB cable. If the cable gets weak or damaged just use a new cable. There is a bluetooth version as well, if that's what you prefer.

The backlight is excellent, shining strongly through the symbols without any glare from between the keys. It's configurable for colour and pattern, and the keys also have 3 layers of mapping, so you can generate any code from any key. All configuration is from the keyboard itself, without the need for any software. I'm using it on Linux.

It doesn't have an F-key row. You shift numbers to get F-keys. Not really a problem, but I find that because I'm used to an F-key row, there is a slight tendency for my fingers to target the second row down, which is the wrong row, but I think my muscle memory has fixed that now.

The tilde / backtick key at the top left of the number row is changed to the ESC key (which would normally be on the F-key row). This means you have to shift ESC to get tilde and backtick. This is annoying and it's not going to go away. I remapped HOME to tilde but this is the price for not having an F-key row.

The number row, and punctuation keys have the two different symbols side by side instead of on top of each other. Some may think it's kinda cool, but it hinders key recognition a little. I sometimes have to look twice to confirm the key, even though I touch type.

They also added a column to the right to provide HOME PGUP PGDN and the PN control key used for mapping and lighting. This gives extra room for full size cursor keys unlike many compact keyboards. But again I find the extra column confuses my muscle memory and makes it a little harder to target the backspace now that it's one key inside and not on the very far right like normal.

It does have the bottom left control keys in the right order too, even though you could remap them if you wanted: CTRL WIN ALT in that order.

Overall, it's the world's best slim, low profile, compact keyboard available that I know of. Well worth sourcing it if you rely on your keyboard.