Ducky's 'world's first' analog keyboard offers Cherry inductive switches and wireless—but is it better than Hall effect?

Inductive switches deliver analogue functionality without the high power draw of Hall effect. That's what Ducky claims at its Computex 2024 booth, anyways, where it's showing off the «world's first» inductive keyboard, the Ducky OneX.

It's built with Cherry's new Multipoint switches, though you'd be hard-pressed to tell at Ducky's booth. Cherry also wasn't making a massive song-and-dance about Multipoint at its own booth, though the switch is quite new.

The Ducky OneX will come in both full-size and 60% layouts. Personally, I prefer the full-size but I'm a sucker for a numpad. Both models offer tri-mode connectivity—2.4 GHz, Bluetooth, and wired via USB Type-C. The connection mode is switched on the rear of the keyboard.

«You don't see a wireless keyboard on those magnetic keyboards because they are power inefficient,» Ducky representative Erik Hsieh tells me. «Our inductive analogue switches, they don't consume that much energy, so we are able to put to make them on a wireless keyboard.»

The battery life reported on the two new Ducky inductive keyboards is reportedly «really great» too. Though it doesn't go into specifics.

Though I'm curious as to what actually happens with an inductive switch versus a Hall effect one, which measures a key press through a magnetic field. Kahwen Hsiao, Ducky's product management director, explains.

«There's a metal design inside the switch and you have all these coils on the PCBA that detects the movement,» Hsiao says.

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He also explains that while Hall effect requires a sensor for every switch, the inductive switches don't.

«Whatever number of keys you have, you have that number of [Hall effect] sensors to power. But for the inductive switches you have the coils that are already built into the PCBA. So that's why we can save a lot of power.»

Though reportedly these switches can still offer the same feature set as magnetic switches,