Software

Tesoro has a standalone firmware updater tool for their keyboards, in case you shy away from their software option, and it can be downloaded from the product page. At the time of testing, the provided sample had the latest firmware already, but the tool allowed for a side load nonetheless, as seen above.


The new Tesoro software for their keyboards is called Tesoro 360, and it can also be downloaded from the product page, alongside the firmware updater tool. The installer is all of 22 MB in size, while the final install takes up all of 103 MB for what is a pretty light driver in terms of resources relative to other such solutions on the market. It has increased in size nearly three-fold since we last saw it, however, which may be a case of more products being supported, and it is now complete instead of in beta as before.


Opening it for the first time with the keyboard connected, we see a homepage similar to the then-beta Tesoro 360 we saw before, which I suppose is fine in that it was polished enough at that point and remains so now. If you have multiple compatible keyboards connected, you can scroll through them to choose one for further customization. This then brings up the real home page for the product.

Tesoro 360 opens up in a default white theme that is clean and fairly minimalist-looking. There are five keyboard profiles to choose from in addition to the default PC profile, with each getting a dedicated spot at the top alongside the settings and home options. The home option just takes you back to the starting screen, and the settings page allows you to check and update both the device firmware and driver version alike if you want to go this route instead of the standalone updater. The overall user interface and experience is much better than what Tesoro had for their previous drivers, so I am happy to see this retained in the full release.

Knowing that the quick start menu is just related to lighting, I wanted to tackle that separately along with the advanced lighting options. As such, the video above goes through the key assignment section in the advanced options menu. Tesoro doesn't allow for any changes to be made to their default PC mode, and wisely so as it prevents simple user errors, so key assignment is available in the other five profiles. Here, every single key can be customized via a set of options in a drop-down menu, including the ability to launch a program, which helps associate the profile with a specific program as well. Other available options are to disable the key entirely, assign a mouse or keyboard function to it, or make it a dedicated media control key or one for a Windows OS function. There is a macro assignment section that opens up a macro editor as well, which works well enough with further options available.

There are two menus for lighting options, including the aforementioned quick start menu that ends up giving us a set of nine preset lighting effects to choose from. These include static, dynamic, and type responsive effects with a virtual keyboard demonstrating the former set of effects on screen. There is also a set of nine colors to quickly change between, as well as the all-important off option to turn off backlighting completely. If you want more options, you will find them in the advanced menu where you can now also select the region these preset effects are applied to. These include a set of keys, and it is rather fun to see a row of keys go through a rainbow wave, for example. The custom lighting page contains per-key lighting option with finer control on the individual color as well, allowing 256 levels of brightness per R/G/B channel for a spectrum of 16.8 M colors per RGB LED.