Hippokey Hippo 65 Affordable Custom Mechanical Keyboard Review

It’s a great time to be a PC gamer. New, excellent affordable custom mechanical keyboards are releasing all the time and those in the know can tell you: it’s one of the fastest, easiest ways to upgrade your computing experience. The Hippo 65 from Hippokey is a compact, fully aluminum, fully built, and fully customized mechanical keyboard coming to Kickstarter starting at $89. It’s programmable, sounds great, and offers fast 2.4GHz wireless in addition to Bluetooth and wired connectivity. It’s a steal at this price and well worth backing. 

Specifications

Current Price: 

• $89 — Super Early Bird (Kickstarter) 
• $99 — Early Bird (Kickstarter)
• $139 — MSRP (Kickstarter)

Hippokey Hippo 65 — Design and Highlights

Another week, another custom mechanical keyboard makes its debut. Today we're talking about the Hippo 65 from Hippokey. It's the debut product from a new brand, but clearly one has been paying attention to the evolution of the customer mechanical keyboard market and one with the manufacturing capability to produce its keyboard at such a low price. What it's offering isn't exactly new but at this price it's still a pretty great deal.

The Hippo 65 utilizes a 65% layout. That means it doesn't have a number row, a numpad, or a navigation and editing cluster but it does have dedicated arrow keys and a column of navigation and editing buttons. This layout is popular among gamers because it leaves extra space for your mouse hand. It's also more ergonomic because your hands can be placed closer together. If you are worried about the missing keys, fret not. All of the missing functions are either already mapped or can be added to secondary layers accessible when holding the Fn key.

The keyboard includes just about every feature you would hope for from a pre-built custom. It utilizes a gasket based mounting structure, so keystrokes are soft and cushioned with a nice rounded sound profile. There are multiple layers of dampening foams for acoustic tuning. The switches it comes