Driver

Tesoro promised a revamped driver for their keyboards, and the GRAM XS is the first to use it. The new driver is called Tesoro 360, and it can be downloaded fromthe product page. The installer is all of 7 MB in size, while the final install takes up all of 37 MB for what is a pretty light driver in terms of resources taken on a recent generation eight-core Intel processor systems.


This is usually where I talk briefly about how well the driver performs and scales, but things are different today. You see, Tesoro decided to release the GRAM XS keyboard before the driver was completed. It finally was made available to the public a few days after the keyboard was out in the USA, but even so only in an incomplete beta form. There is a note mentioning as much below the download section, indicating further that the final release is expected on or before May 1. I am not really a fan of this, and for the sake of the review, I will consider the driver features as they are today for the eventual score. Any upcoming features or optimization alike will not have any impact on this review.

With the keyboard connected, the driver recognizes it immediately and opens up in a default white theme that is clean and fairly minimalist-looking. There are three keyboard profiles to choose from in addition to the default PC profile, with each of these getting a dedicated spot at the top alongside the settings and home options. The home option just takes you back to the starting screen where, presumably, all supported devices show up with a horizontal scroll bar to choose between them for device-specific options, and the settings page allows you to check and update both the device firmware and driver version alike. Tesoro has a standalone firmware updater available next to the driver installer on the product page, but it is simpler and neater to use the tied-in functionality here. As seen in the video, my sample had received a firmware update and that process was flawless. The overall user interface and experience is much better than what Tesoro had for their previous drivers, so I am happy about this at the very minimum.

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 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 three 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 here 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 except for one thing—keystrokes tend to get recorded twice. Indeed, there is a bug here wherein even inserting a function/delay via the mouse results in it being entered twice as well. Tesoro is aware of this, so hopefully this is resolved by the time the final release rolls around.

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 is not active as of the time of this review and presumably contains per-key lighting options. There is finer control on the individual color as well, with 256 levels of brightness per R/G/B channel for a spectrum of 16.8 M colors.

As it is today, Tesoro 360 is promising and an indicator of a good driver to come. It is a shame that they were not able to finish it in time to coincide with the release of the keyboard, but designing a new driver from scratch does take time. The bugs in the driver, coupled with the missing features, do make it seem like early access has hit the peripherals market, however, and that is never good.