Ballistics Report

Pros

Full Color LCD: The big, beautiful LCD is a huge improvement over the monochrome display on the G15. Videos look pretty darn good, as do images and web pages rendered in the RSS reader.

Some of the usefulness of the built-in applications can be questionable, such as the YouTube plug-in and the movie viewer. But others, like the media display and performance monitor can be extremely useful. 3rd party add-ons increase the functionality of the LCD as well, such as Ventrilo and Everest which are great for keeping track of both raiding parties and system temperatures.

Customizable Color and G-Keys: The capability to set the background color is a neat touch, as is the ability to program macros using either the game profiling software or on the fly. While some may lament the loss of 6 G-keys from the first G15, having 36 macros across 3 different modes means you still have quite a bit of options for programming common actions in most of your games.

Cons

Cost: The biggest drawback to the G19 is the price at $199. That’s some serious cash to be had for what is essentially just a keyboard. For that kind of money, you can easily get a decent GPU upgrade, such as an ATI 4870 or nVidia 260. In the current economic climate, we imagine there won’t be too many people willing to drop that kind of cash on something unless it provides a real tangible benefit.

Monochrome Support: While the G19 launches with more applications supporting it natively than the G15, most of the support is designed around the monochrome display featured on the latter. With the capability to display images and video in such beautiful color and clarity, we hope developers will quickly make use of the more powerful LCD on the G19.