At the beginning of the year I had a chance to review Logitech's first G15 keyboard and was quite impressed, giving it an 8.8 out of 10. Now I say first, because Logitech has now released a second version of the G15 which (since it is completely absent from the list of products on their website) seems to have completely replaced the original. And the new version is a bit of a surprise.

One of the few complaints some had against the original G15 was its folding display screen. Besides a small number of user created programs and a few office and normal desktop related applications that Logitech had written for it, there seemed to be only a handful of games that supported it initially. Though Logitech made the programming information freely available to both developers and consumers alike (even going so far as to include it on the driver CD), it never felt like it really found any momentum. Add to that the issue of having to look away from your monitor to read the small text against its blue-lit background, and its utility for gamers became very questionable. Looking away from your screen to see your ammo count may not have made much sense to potential purchasers, especially if you assumed that the screens cost was what pushed the keyboards price to $100.

So when Logitech released a cheaper, LCD-less version called the G11 quickly thereafter, those of us who did appreciate it thought that the peripherals manufacturer had abandoned the idea.

Thankfully, we were wrong. The new G15 still sports an LCD screen, but now the amber color of the text against the black background makes the information much easier to read in very quick glances and can even be taken in at times without you having to look away from the monitor at all. Besides those that are included on the driver CD, the Logitech GamePanel page shows the number of applications that utilize it seems to have grown a bit too, including FRAPS and xfire.