November 20, 2008 - I am an incredible proponent of online gaming. In fact, I've developed such an affinity for online play that my purchasing of a game often hinges on whether or not it has an online multiplayer mode. For me, I find being able to interact and compete with real people is more gratifying and more compelling than AI players. Granted, most of the time I can't stand to listen to the endless amounts of politically incorrect smack talk exuded by my fellow gamers, but in such cases I turn to private chat or voice messages. When all else fails (or my microphone dies), I fall back on text communication. In these rare instances, it's nice to have an external keyboard on hand to save time and sanity. While you can easily use a USB keyboard with both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, both Microsoft and Sony have offered their own text-entry solutions via compact controller add-ons. While Microsoft's Xbox 360 Chatpad was released over a year ago, Sony's Wireless Keypad for PlayStation 3 was introduced only three months ago at the Leipzig Games Convention. Now, Sony has begun shipping the Wireless Keypad and hopes to capitalize on holiday sales, but does this QWERTY add-on deliver? Read on for our full review.


There are a number of truly compelling features of the PlayStation 3 Wireless Keypad. For starters, users can quickly access their messages and friends lists from two dedicated buttons. The dedicated buttons cut away the time spent bringing up the PlayStation button and navigating to your messages and/or friends list by jumping directly to the necessary portion of the XMB. The other particularly interesting feature of the Wireless Keypad is its touch-sensitive keys, which allow users to navigate menus by simply swiping a finger across the keypad surface. This can also serve as a means of controlling the pointer when using the PlayStation 3's online web browser.

Unfortunately, however, the touch-sensitive navigation feature isn't nearly as effective as I would have hoped. The swiping gestures work well enough for scrolling through content on your XMB, but when it comes to stopping and selecting an item in particular, the gestures fall short. I found that when I wanted to select something, there touch navigation was either too slow or imprecise. Too often I found myself going several items further down the list than I wanted. Worse yet, I found that sometimes when the scrolling would stop, I would select "Enter" and at the last minute the delay in the keypad's response would cause me to select something I didn't want. The touch sensitivity seems inconsistent at best, and certain areas of the keypad seem to be more reactive than others. The other major issue I found with the keypad was how you go about enabling the touch scrolling and navigation. The device requires that you push a dedicated button in order to turn the touch sensors on, which doesn't make much sense. It's obvious that the toggle was included in order to prevent erroneous navigation during text entry, but in reality mouse movement has no function once the text entry box is brought up. It seems like it would have been easier to leave the touch navigation enabled by default until the text entry box is brought up.