Software

Arbiter Studio had sent out the keyboard in late December last year itself but I opted to wait until now so as to be able to test the software customization feature the company was working on. As of the day I write this review, the Polar 65 has standalone software in beta state that you need to contact the company to get the installer for. Alternatively, and this is what I recommend customers do, there is now a web-based solution with the exact same functionality and this means you don't have to install yet another program on your PC. The web app, also in beta, has a link on the product page and can be found here. I immediately thought this was maybe based on VIA given the similarity to connecting the keyboard but turns out its not.


The web app is actually much better designed than VIA is for the mainstream audience and this is important given Arbiter Studio is targeting gamers with the Polar 65. The layout and user experience is very smooth and there is no sign of any bugs at this point. That being said, given this is a beta application some features are still in the works. The first week I was testing the customization I noticed the keyboard profiles weren't really working. Two days later the company released a new firmware update for the keyboard and also pushed out an update to the software/web app allowing this to work flawlessly. More importantly, it doesn't seem to randomly take up a lot of CPU/RAM cycles either and Chrome didn't seem to mind it either.

The video above goes over the features currently available with the Polar 65 in its latest firmware v1.0.2 that can be found here. Follow the instructions about not updating the firmware with the keyboard on a USB hub in case it needs to have a hardware reset (Fn + Esc for 5 seconds) and be tried again. You can have multiple profiles created and selected as necessary as well as customize the LEDs via a plethora of pre-set lighting effects allowing use of the 16.8 M colors on offer. There's no key mapping currently and you can't stack lighting effects or operate them on a per-key basis at this point so clearly there remains work to be done. I did like that you can set the switch actuation point, on a per-key basis as needed, from 0.1 to 3.8 mm in addition to doing the same for the rapid trigger mode. Overall I like what I am seeing and clearly Arbiter Studio is adding new features, but do be aware of the currently limited nature of software customization support for the Polar 65.