Belkin N52TE - a review and a bit more,

That is awesome, or it would be if it worked.

That is the basic problem with this device, for those of us who had the earlier revision, the N52, we know how it is supposed to work. If you buy an upgrade to a previous product you don't expect to lose such a large number of features.

You don't expect features advertised right on the packaging to be non-functional either.

NotAsCoolAsItSeems has done a good job of documenting a large number of the community’s complaints, I haven't personally experienced all of the items on the list, but after browsing the support forums I can confirm they do exist for many people.

I'll copy and paste the NotAsCoolAsItSeems list here so you don't have to search for it.

• It is not an upgrade from its predecessor, Nostromo N52, the new N52TE has three selectable key states. The N52 had four.
• You cannot transfer any of your old macros to the new unit.
• Macro software and drivers are buggy especially when using mouse clicks, special keys and delays.
• Macro execution rarely or doesn't work if a mouse click is mapped to a key.
• Macro execution rarely or doesn't work if a special key is mapped to the d-pad .
• Macro execution fails to complete correctly if the key state toggle is set to one of the d-pad directions.
• The d-pad does not allow for diagonal movement in games.
• Key map toggle doesn't toggle, it switches to the next key map state, meaning you may need to click through a useless or unused key map state to get back to the original.
• You can not run a macro and simultaneously run another macro or use other keys on the unit.

It is both hilarious and sad that this products official forum has become an advertisement for one of its competitors. Many posts refer to the Logitech G13 gaming keypad as an alternative. The above issues and lack of support in the official forums has caused many people to feel that the hardware has been abandoned or written off by Belkin. They may be correct.

Although this item is still being actively sold on-line and in retail stores there has been very little progress with the drivers. Posts in the forum indicate that the issues can not be fixed due to some hardware limitations. It seems that the onboard memory  is insufficient to....

Ok I just got really side tracked from the review, I went to look for a post on the N52te forums  so I could include it here. It detailed the reason that the device has had so much trouble. 

Basically  it seems they didn't include enough memory in the device to support the advertised features. This combined with other hardware limitations has caused the D-pad and macro problems . The post was made by an Admin or Belkin rep in response to a technically minded user  who asked if that was the problem.

Even though this review is a negative one, I  wanted to keep it honest and include some supporting evidence for my arguments.

You can not search the forums without being registered, this caused me to try and register on their forums. I couldn't find the post but I did find something else.

This product does seem to have been abandoned and the below details why I believe this to be the case.

After attempting to register I never recieved the forum account activation  e-mail. I checked my spam filters then tried again, still no luck , I disabled the spam filters, still nothing. So I looked futher.

• In the forum there are some odd stats for I high traffic site . 2,320 registered members. 4,498 posts in the forums. Now look at the post counts and look at the number of replies to posts. 571,787 views 1 reply, 862,545 views 4 replies. Nearly 1 million views and only four responses ?
• Maybe they have left the latest registered users module enabled.
• Lots of people have registered recently, most though have zero posts.
• I  register again with a different e-mail address. It still doesn't work.
• I check the recently registered users , click refresh, yep there is my name with about 26 others , but now it says "Validating" next to all of them. huh ?
• I look at the "most recent member welcome"  the last one actually able to validate his account. Looking at the profile you can see "Joined: 9-October 08."

Editors Note:

To confirm this I waited 1 week before posting this article.
I checked the forum registrations each day. About  20 to 30 people attempt to register every day.
None are validated.
I e-mailed Belkin and recieved a generic response asking me to call their help line for "futher assistance".
-- If Belkin has a response to this article I will post it with their company listing.

 

Further update :

It appears some users were able to register for a short time but the mechanism to enable it is in such a way that most of the newly registered users are / were unable to post . If you look,  the vast majority of new verified  users have NO posts even on accounts months old. Validating users still numbers in the 20 - 30 a day range..

A mistake or deliberate, my thoughts.

They disabled new member validation just before the Christmas season.

With the number of complaints the forums were becoming an increasingly bad PR nightmare. Christmas was just around the corner, sales were already tanking and they still had a large amount of stock to move. Belkin probably felt they needed do something. With so many views and requests for support if they had removed the forums altogether people would have noticed, particularly the currently regisered ones. Disabling the validation e-mail would make most users believe they had just missed the validation e-mail due to spam filters or some random error.

I will send Belkin an e-mail to confirm, but that doesn't matter. If they reply saying that it was just a mistake and they forgot to re-enable the validation after forum maintenance it still tells the consumer one thing.

Belkin doesn't care about you.

Why make that assumption ? There were 24 other "validating" users when I registered, 20 ~30 people each day try to register, these get removed or deleted if they are not validated in 24 hours. The board gets a fair amount of traffic, but Belkin cares so little about support they never noticed that there were no new users posting in the forums?

Ok back to the review

I am just going to wrap it up here, and give you my conclusions.

Would I recommend this product.

No if

• your primary game of choice requires macros that include special keys or mouse clicks.
• you need more than 3 shift states.
• your usual game play style requires a real toggle of shift states.
• you require granular control of delays in macro events.
• you depend on the D-pad for movement,  the effectiveness of this varies from game to game, in some games it does work.
• you want to map a special key or mouse click to the D-pad.

Yes if

• You are primarily looking for a more ergonomic  alternative to a keyboard. The design is solid. The popularity of the original N52's layout is a proved winner.
• You can for-go the other features and are looking for a responsive controller. This device does have a nice feeling to the keypress and it does seem faster than the original unit.
• You don't require/depend on macros.

Yes this review is a negative one but the feel of the device and its reponsiveness is good and so is the physical build quality. There are better alternatives if you require a full featured controller but they cost more.

There are cheaper devices if you just want something with a similar layout and basic macro support.