Logitech's USB Unifying Receiver: one dongle to serve multiple input peripherals
By Darren Murph 
posted August 4th 2009 5:53AM
posted August 4th 2009 5:53AM
[Via Engadget Chinese]
posted August 4th 2009 5:53AM
Logitech Wireless Keyboard K350
Logitech Marathon Mouse M705
Logitech Wave Keyboard
Logitech M505
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I need this for Rockband more than anything. 2 guitars + drums means I have 3 receivers plugged into my PS3.
As to those who say "why don't they just make better Bluetooth mice?", I agree. The controllers on the PS3 have shown that Bluetooth is incredibly responsive and have good battery life, so there's no reason Bluetooth mice couldn't be great. I do agree though tha so far they have not been great, they are unresponsive coming out of sleep (first time you move them after more than 10 seconds not doing so).
Maybe it's a chipset problem? Apple's Bluetooth mice seem to work okay.
It's all nice and sweet until you need to strangle somebody and don't have a cord handy.
This is NOT new. Logitech 'wireless desktop' kits have come with one receiver for mouse and keyboard for eons, but at least the older versions that I have did have a split cable at the PC with USB (mouse) and PS/2 (keyboard) connections. But it is still one RF receiver. My gyration RF keyboard and mouse work off of a single USB dongle, and that's at least a four year old product. So maybe this is new for Logitech, but they are late to the game.
PLUS the reciever is designed to support up to 8 devices. So you can have 4 mice and 4 keyboards connected through one reciever.
I have no idea why... I think they planned on releasing other input devices for it, and never did.
Finish it and I will be impressed. ANYONE can do the first line.
$^#&*^$*&#^*& Comment system!!!
This was SUSPOSED to be a reply to:
Newone @ Aug 4th 2009 6:45AM
One dongle to rule them all.
I also think this is a great idea but its only compatible with a fixed number of devices?
Right now I have four devices connected with Kensington Slimblade keyboard/mouse combo. The keyboard is actually divided into three parts: keyboard, numpad, and remote (alot of batteries). Although Kensington's dongle is no nano receiver, it is still pretty dang small.
I love the nano receiver.
Sounds cool but will it work, and will it work with a typical desktop that's underneath the desk? i have the reciever for my Cordless Desktop® S 510 combo right on my desk, no further than a foot from the keyboard and it still cuts out, causing letters to be missed and not inputted, i had to re-sync several times, not to mention the VX nano i have for my laptops, it doesnt even connect anymore, the only wireless setup i havent had trouble with is my MX Revolution. To this day you still cant beat the reliability of a corded mouse, thats why i trust my MX510 and G5 more than my wireless mice any day.
but you can buy a usb extension for less than $5 then put the receiver inside the table.
Instead of making it run 6 keyboards why aren't they making it compatible with all of their new products? Webcams, gamepads, headphones, remotes, DUH. And lower the damn LATENCY
I have a Logitech Cordless Trackman MArble and the damn thing drops out all the time with the receiver barely 5 feet away.
I have a Microsoft cordless mouse and I can get barely 2 feet out of the thing. Both with fresh batteries.
I have an Apple Bluetooth keyboard (on a PC with a generic BT dongle) and it is WONDERFUL! Never drops out. Never loses presses, and the batteries last forever.
If companies are not going to use Bluetooth for their wireless peripherals and are going to be proprietary, then they need to GTF off of the 2.4Ghz band! It's way too crowded. Whatever happened to 900Mhz that cordless phones used to use? Those things had incredible range and it must be largely abandoned by now. How often do you see 900Mhz phones anymore? 2.4 (and 5.2) Ghz were pimped like higher frequency meant better throughput (for a whopping 16khz worth of phone audio bandwidth).
...Sean.
If Logitech could actually build a decent bluetooth mouse, this wouldn't be an issue.
WTF! I hope Logitech is not abandoning the no software required wireless USB peripherals. I hate dongles, but I do not have administrator rights on my work computer and cannot install their software application that manages the two to four devices into one dongle awesomeness. I have two Logitech Wireless Mice, and not having to install anything is a perk.
Please be advised that logitech has removed the scroll lock key from many of their keyboards, with as rationale that they found 'many people accidentally pushed scroll lock while using excel which changes the movement from cell-to-cell into page-to-page and didn't know how to undo it so they had to reboot' and to fix such incredibly stupid people's issues they removed the ScrollLock key from their keyboards, this caused many issues for people with KVM's that use the ScrollLock to switch between computers, so then logitech replaced the functionality in newer keyboards by making FN+otherkey to become the ScrollLock key, which apparently does NOT confuse excel user eh.
Anyway you were warned, look out for the scrolllock if you buy a logitech keyboard and care for it.