Driver

The driver for the Tesoro GRAM SE Spectrum is specific to the keyboard. Named as such, it can be downloaded here. At the time of review, the latest version available was 1.0, which came out in April of this year and has not been updated since. The installer is 7.2 MB in size and takes up just 26.1 MB once installed. Installation is straightforward, and the driver is light on system resources, which is as it should be. Note also that there is a firmware updater available over that same link, which downloads as a compressed archive and has an executable that flashes and updates the keyboard's firmware when run (as long as the keyboard is connected, of course). You have to then disconnect and re-connect the keyboard to get the driver to save any changes, even though it is not mentioned anywhere and is a giant potential for confusing customers.


With the keyboard's firmware updated, it is time to take a look at the driver itself, and we see that it is more refined than the driver the older GRAM Spectrum has just by first looks. A cleaner window with a tabs interface is used here, and I did not experience any bugs once I figured out the save issue after a firmware update.

Since driver and firmware updates are done outside of the driver itself, the general settings here are not much to choose from. If you happened to have a specific language version of the keyboard, you can set that here, and the virtual keyboard changes to reflect it too. Missing are some options I would have liked to see, such as the polling rate, lighting during the system in sleep mode, and character repeat rate. There are a total of six profiles pre-programmed, and all are functionally identical out of the box, with "PC Mode" being the default one that can't be edited. The rest differ only in the default lighting scheme and can be renamed as well as assigned to initiate when a specific application is opened up. Once you are in one of these five profiles, the Assignment tab is active, wherein clicking on one of the virtual keys on screen opens up a window with more options for key assignment, including disabling it entirely, mouse actions, media controls, etc. So you could have a set of dedicated media control buttons, for example.

This is where things got frustrating, but only until I realized that Tesoro uses "Spectrum" to mean two things: Spectrum color refers to multi-color with one color changing to the other similar to what others refer to as an RGB mode, and Profile color would be the specific color you choose at the top in the Lighting tab. However, notice how there is a Spectrum lighting effect as well in the Lighting tab? This effect is taken up by whatever you did in the third tab entitled "Spectrum," which in this case is really per-key lighting only with three sub-modes to it. See the confusion here? You can have the keyboard in, say, breathing mode and spectrum color or spectrum mode, static effect and spectrum color or spectrum mode, breathing effect and spectrum color, and those are just some of the more similar-sounding combinations available. There is simply no excuse for this, language barrier or otherwise, and it's a good thing that some trial-and-error is all it takes to understand what is going on here. Regardless, points shall be docked for this sore lack of design.

The final tab is all about macros, and it is thankfully designed well enough to where everything makes sense. One thing I did notice here is that the tool tips for the onboard buttons, say, rename or create, are no longer showing up, and they only did so on the home tab for profiles. So this is another case where Tesoro needs to step up their quality control, as small things like this add up to just leave a poor taste in the customer's mouth. Once you have recorded a macro, you can edit it, and saving it adds it to the list of macros that can then be assigned to a key under the Assignment tab as in the video above.

Overall, this feels like a regression in many ways compared to even the rudimentary software driver for the Tesoro GRAM Spectrum from last year. While there are more options available here, Tesoro made it hard to use to the fullest without having to spend some time on figuring out the user interface and terminology, and the lack of any manual for the driver does not help either. Oh, and there is also the part where the driver is device-specific, so be prepared to have multiple drivers installed if you own multiple Tesoro peripherals with software support.