While I haven’t moved to building my own keyboards yet, I’m still expanding my collection of keyboards and refining my preferences. The latest addition to my collection is the Mojo68 in translucent purple. I purchased this through their Kickstarter campaign and while it was delayed in arrival the team was highly communicative throughout the process so it never felt like I was waiting without information.
MelGeek has other keyboards available for sale currently but they’re only taking emails for notification about when they launch this keyboard for sale if you want your own version of it.
What’s in the Box
Opening the box you’re greeted by a stiff basic USB C cable that I never even unwrapped. You also get a keycap puller, some extra keys, and the 2.5Ghz dongle for the keyboard.
Then of course you get the keyboard itself and a small manual with some instructions about the function of the keyboard.
Basic Specs
The Mojo68 gasket mounted 68 key keyboard, it’s not as small as my Anne Pro 2 which is missing the entire right-hand row of keys that the Mojo68 has. I never use the extra row though so I could go without it and be entirely fine.
While there are no sidelights or under glow, the keyboard does have lights and the translucent plastic shows those lights all around the side nicely.
Connections
This is a tri-mode keyboard providing a wired USB C connection, wireless 2.4Ghz connections with a dongle, and a Bluetooth connection. You access the different modes via a small switch on the back left of the keyboard.
All the modes of the keyboard work fine, but I continue to use the keyboard in Bluetooth mode because it’s my preference. I’ve found the typing response to be perfectly fine in Bluetooth mode for my writing and iPad work.
The Mojo68 can connect to 4 different Bluetooth devices by holding down the Bt button in combination with the number keys 1 through 4. The keyboard reports which channel it’s on in the name of the Bluetooth device connected to your computer. MelGeek-C1 is channel one and C4 would be channel four.
Battery Life
On the battery life front, it lasts a long time. The Mojo68 comes with a 4000 mAh battery which is pretty standard in these types of keyboards. In practice, it’s been a couple of months and I haven’t charged the keyboard. I think this is mainly because it goes to sleep so fast that it’s conserving battery. As I write this it’s sitting at 84% battery left.
Now I actually find how fast it goes to sleep just a bit annoying. Not a deal-breaker and I love the battery life I’m getting, but I wish it either woke up faster or took longer to go to sleep.
On iPadOS the keyboard does report it’s battery level as a generic Bluetooth device. So it shows up in the battery widget but doesn’t get a keyboard icon. It’s just some random Bluetooth thing. Of course, I’d prefer to see a keyboard icon, but at least it reports its battery level and it does show the MelGeek name beside the generic icon. Maybe I’m just complaining about something to complain.
Keycaps, Switches and Typing Feel
This is my first keyboard with lubed Gateron Silver Pro switches. This is a linear switch that feels excellent to type on. I actually have a set of Kailh Box White switches I had intended to put in my Moonlander that I’ll need to lube before I put them in. The feeling of a lubed switch is so nice.
These are a double shot keycap, though I don’t see that Mojo ever specified which type of plastic they are so I can’t speak to that. I’m not seeing the keycaps get any type of shine to them after a couple of months of medium use and ultimately I think my purple keycaps look excellent.
If you want to see what’s inside then TaeKeyboards starts tearing his down at 12:59.
Media Keys
The Mojo68 comes with a bunch of media keys programmed in already that work on macOS and iPadOS without modification. To start you’ll need to press the FN key and then pressing Enter at the same time accesses play/pause.
Using FN with the up/down arrow keys controls the volume of your device. While pressing FN with the Page Down button mutes the volume.
The left/right arrow keys skip forward or back by 1 track in your audio source.
I thought these key commands would be a bit confusing, but in practice, I use my iPad as my audio device even when I’m on macOS and I access these keyboard commands without issue all the time.
Programming
Out of the box, there is no ‘macOS’ mode to put the keyboard in so you’ll need to download the software and changes the CTRL and ⌘ keys to get it to work in the expected way for macOS or iPadOS.
The software is the only point I could really complain about the keyboard. I got it working but it’s all in…some language I don’t read…so it took a few minutes of messing around to get the expected settings working. The big hang-up was that I didn’t need to “save” anything and push it to the keyboard like I’ve needed to do with other keyboards I own. When you make a change it’s just live on the keyboard.
You can change the lighting settings for the keyboard by pressing Fn and the ZXC keys. Z turns the lights on/off. X changes the mode of the lights on the keyboard and C changes the colour of the lights.
I always like the mode that makes the lights flash while I’m typing and leaves them off when I’m not using the keyboard so I found that and left it set. I’ve set the lights to purple to match the board.
The only key I miss is the backtick key which I use fairly regularly in my writing. You can still access it by pressing FN + ESC but I almost always forget that and press the ESC key by itself first. Then I go back and press the proper set of keys to access backtick. If you don’t write in markdown and don’t use the backtick key this won’t be a problem for you.
Verdict
I love the look of this keyboard. The switches and typing feel are excellent. I picked up the secondary media keys easily so, yes I’d recommend this keyboard for someone looking for a mechanical keyboard. The only hurdle is for those that don’t read the language in the programming software. It’s not a huge hurdle since it saves automatically, but it’s a hurdle still.