The Wooting One is a fairy tale story of a bunch of unknown people now owning a brand that is worthy of consideration worldwide because it uses a new technology that actually makes it worthy of being called a gaming keyboard. This story could have gone wrong on so many occasions, and I am happy I had my apprehensions invalidated over the course of this review and also following the transparency of the company as a whole.

The keyboard as it comes out of the box is a standard mechanical keyboard with neat packaging and swappable optical switches that allow you to customize your Wooting One with linear or tactile and clicky switches as desired. With per-key 16.8 M RGB backlighting in a TKL form factor, a software driver, and an aluminum alloy plate, it already merits consideration in the crowded market of mechanical keyboards today. If this was all there was to it, however, the direct competition from Bloody/A4Tech and Tesoro would have likely eaten it alive given the lower cost and larger market presence of the latter.

This is where the analog controls come in. The Wooting One has from day one been advertised as an analog gaming keyboard offering users the ability to map buttons to analog controller outputs. In this case, there are up to three analog profiles saved on board you can map to either the XBOX-controller layout or a general gamepad controller by the way of any of the 87 keys available. This was clearly a challenge to conceive even on paper, and Wooting did a good job with Flaretech in designing and realizing the use of two lenses and an IR LED + sensor to translate downward key movement into analog control. With a total travel distance of 4 mm and an analog range of 1.5-3.6 mm, this is as good a debut product as any I could have asked for. There are physical limitations that will prevent consistent use of the full 4 mm as an analog range, but there is definitely scope for the switch design to be enhanced. That is for later, however, as there remain other things to do with the Wooting One.

This is where the company and community they have built already come in. With a public roadmap of features to be implemented, bugs discovered and handled, and game profiles created and uploaded, this is a case of a small startup making the most of their user base. Their current customers were backers from their crowdfunding campaign and are together with Wooting going out of their way to make this product better by the week, and this and word of mouth will do more than any marketing campaign could. For my part, I no longer see it as a beta device with the latest driver (at the time of this review) since it resolved any of the bugs I faced. So I have no issues recommending it to those who want more than just another mechanical keyboard at the $150+ price point.