Logitech diNovo Mini Keyboard review

That brings us to the comparisons. We've seen several products over the years purporting to be ideal for controlling your Media Center PC. Your typical wireless keyboard often claims some kind of multimedia functionality, but most of them, such as the diNovo Edge and Microsoft's Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000 and 8000, are full size and geared toward a traditional desktop.

We can't ever see putting one of them in your living room with a true home cinema PC such as the Alienware Hangar18. The alternative has been the small-scale keyboard, such as the Gyration model or the Vidabox trackball keyboard. And as much as we liked the trackball on the Vidabox keyboard, neither of those scaled-down keyboards can compete with the versatility or the visual elegance of the diNovo Mini.

Performance
Setting up the diNovo Mini is a breeze. It uses a Bluetooth connection and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, and it went from the box to up and running on a Vista-equipped PC in less than two minutes.

You can install the Logitech SetPoint software if you want to customise the hot key assignments and tweak the mouse cursor speed. It can also work with a PlayStation 3. We can certainly think of tweaks we'd like to see to the design, such as Apple and Xbox 360 support.

The diNovo Mini also has dedicated play, volume and channel hot keys, which work fine for driving Windows- based media, but we'd also like to see some options for controlling your other home cinema hardware. We realise that Logitech has its Harmony universal remote controls to sell as well, but we don't think it's too much to ask to let you use the diNovo Mini to at least let you turn off your television.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday