Last week on a whim I bought the PS3 keyboard accessory which sits on top of the PS3 controller.

It is very strange and badly designed on so many levels I am not sure where to start.

The keyboard clips into place by a plastic hook which hooks under the front of the controller.  It sits over the start, back and PS buttons and has new buttons to replace them, it then reaches out above the trigger buttons.

The Xbox 360 keyboard sits snugly between the handle grips and it is easy to use the thumbs to type quickly.  Because the PS3 keyboard is above the controller over the trigger buttons it is not a particularly comfortable fit, I have small hands so I really have to stretch my thumbs to type properly or slacken my grip on the controller and move my hands up nearer to the keyboard.  It feels quite awkward and unnatural.

The keyboard has its own battery power and mini usb charge socket.  This is quite annoying.  If both your controller and keyboard batteries die at the same time you need two cables to charge them both.  The keyboard does have an on/off switch to preserve battery power but that can be annoying aswell – you may forget it is switched on and be happily typing away at a message only to look up and find the cursor on screen has not typed anything as the damned thing is switched off!

Now the other design flaw which I think is particularly bad is the blue and brown function buttons.  Just like on a laptop, characters not normal to numbers and letters can be found above the normal numbers and letters – you press the blue or brown function key and then press the corresponding key you want – it could be a brown character or a blue one. Under normal circumstances this is an excellent idea and works on all laptops, mobile phones and so on.  But who on earth decided to make brown and blue on a black controller?  The characters are too small as it is without making it hard to read because of merging colours.  God forbid anyone uses one that has vision problems.

And Finally…  the keyboard also works as a touchpad.  Press the button with the hand on it and the whole keyboard gets touchy feely and works like a mouse.  Except there seems to be no double click for clicking on links in the web browser so once you have touched your way to a link you then have to move away and find the enter button to click it.  Again, not very user friendly.

I am glad I bought it because it means I don’t have to fumble around for my USB keyboard if someone sends me messages, but it has so many design flaws that it is not something you would want to use on a regular basis.  Accept it gracefully as a Christmas present, but don’t rush out to buy it.