Yesterday Minebea announced that its unique flat Cool Leaf keyboard would finally be available on the market in the middle of March, but the nice people of Minebea was kind enough to give us the possibility to test one of their final and ready to ship Cool Leaf keyboard before everybody else.

So what can we say about this Cool Leaf?

First of all this keyboard is really stunning and is just gorgeous either off or on, Made of plastic this keyboard got its “mirror” like effect thanks to 2000 layers of reflective PET film allowing Minebea to had one of the Cool Leaf unique feature: a Multi-touch capacitive touch panel!

Yes, the magic behind this Cool Leaf is its Multi-Touch capacitive touch panel that you can, depending of your preference tweak in order to either increase of decrease its sensitivity.

The overall concept of the Cool Leaf is pretty basic in a sense that Minebea does not offer here a customizable display but rather built-up its keyboard layout like you would on a normal one with predefined keys all over the surface. Knowing this we now better understand why you will not be capable to change Cool Leaf keyboard layout so easily and why you will have to wait this summer to get your QWERY or AZERTY Cool Leaf.

YouTube Embedded Ready Version

Now what to think about the Cool Leaf and what to expect?

The Cool leaf in a sense will behave like your Android Tablet or iPad keyboard with the exception that Minebea tweaked its keyboard to avoid any mistyping.
I could not play a lot with this keyboard but my first impression are that the Cool Leaf felt rather faster to use than the iPad virtual keyboard for example and that it will allow you the possibility to touch several touch at the same time if you ever need for example to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL.
On the other hand and has stated earlier, Minebea locked the possibility to type several “Main” touch at the same time in order to avoid any mistyping while writing a long letter or document.

Now will I own a cool leaf? Most probably yes and this for several reasons. First and foremost I am completely in loved with the Cool Leaf design, but also despite my first fear, the Cool Leaf is really a usable keyboard, granted you will need to get use to it and its Key layout, but once it is done, you won’t feel much difference between a Mac Aluminum Keyboard for example and the Cool Leaf.

On a Side Note, Minebea is also working to promote the Cool Leaf in other fields like the Medical, Healthcare or Food business where such easy to clean/disinfect flat keyboard can be used, unlike the iPad for example, with a wide variety of Plastic gloves for example.