Conclusion
Well as you may have guessed from reading the rest of this article (unless you just skipped to the end) I think the Belkin SpeedPad has to be the best of the bunch. The Thrustmaster promises a lot and does delivers it albeit in need of much further development and may well get it right if they make a MKII Tactical Board.
The Ferraro Claw is most definitely a welcome surprise package. It comes from the other side of the world and a company I’ve never heard of and yet they have taken a good idea and made and even better product. A lot of time and thought had been put in and I’d be rather interested to see some of the prototypes and design work that went into this final product. It is simple yet elegant and only misses top place because Belkin have a huge head start. It is clear from the build quality and software that Belkin knows something about making quality hardware and peripherals and although as their first real attempt at a gaming device they have obviously not jumped in with their eyes closed
Belkin have taken the key ingredients which are ergonomics, compact size, a good number of buttons and good software and to this they have added the ability to adjust the pad to suit the user. To this they have further added the wheel throttle and best of all in my honest opinion the digital 8-way pad, which is a stroke of pure genius. Everyone can use a gamepad to control a characters movement so why not do that for PC games as well, it’s about time our opposable digit has more to do than press space to jump.
Although the SpeedPad and the Claw are very good they still aren’t quite capable of totally replacing the keyboard in games. I don’t think the keyboard has quite had its day yet, true there is a lot of promise in this type of controller but until they are supported from the outset by the games developers themselves and start being issued with PCs as standard peripherals or at the very least added extras like printers and joysticks then they are unlikely to be on most gamers’ desks. More preconfigured profiles would be nice, what would be nicer is if the games developer included one or more on the disk with the game, which would definitely save a lot of time.
But until that day you could do a lot worse than investing in the SpeedPad, or the Claw for that matter, purely for the ability to show off to your mates, but also because you know its far better for you than contorting your hand to fit a keyboard.
