Sharper Image Cooling Station

Every so often, a product graces the PCMag Labs that will leave more than a few of us scratching our heads in befuddlement. Enter the Sharper Image Cooling Station ($79.99 direct), an item whose main purpose somewhat eludes me. Ostensibly, it's a portable keyboard with a built-in touchpad for your laptop, yet it can only work inches away from the laptop's keyboard. And, as the name implies, it also cools your laptop, but that requires the laptop to be placed in a ridiculously awkward position in order to accommodate the built-in keyboard. And therein lies the main problem with the Sharper Image Cooling Station: while there's obviously nothing inherently wrong with portable keyboards or cooling stations in and of themselves, a combination of the two winds up compromising the utility of both elements to such an extent that the overall product consequently suffers as a whole.

Now, I'm fully aware that Sharper Image isn't a company known for computing prowess. It's more of an entity that specializes in innovative-cum-gimmicky items ranging from foot massagers to automatic tie racks. This lack of focus is apparent with the cooling station. It's a hastily sketched out idea that tries to perform more than one function and winds up doing none of them adequately.

Design
The Sharper Image Cooling Station is constructed out of flimsy plastic and comes in a silver finish. It folds open and close like a laptop, and when it's open and laid out flat, the unit is 17 inches wide and 13.75 inches long, whereas it stands at about 9 inches tall when opened up like a laptop. Opening it up for the first time is a mildly jarring experience because you encounter a keyboard in the lower half but no screen above it, like an incomplete laptop. Instead, you place the bottom of the laptop on this upper portion while tilting your screen upwards. In the end, you wind up with an eye-level screen and the strangely disconcerting, Shining-esque sight of two keyboards staring at you point blank. From an aesthetic angle, the Cooling Station's keyboard is a dead ringer for the MacBook Pro's keyboard, so its keys are in the familiar chiclet style. But while the Cooling Station's keyboard emulates the MacBook Pro's look, the keyboard also has a Windows Start Menu button since it's meant to be compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems. As a mini keyboard, its size is nearly identical as the Evoluent Essentials Full Featured Compact Keyboard (EKB) ($49.95 direct, 3.5 stars). There's also a touchpad beneath the keyboard which, despite its superficial similarity to the MacBook's touchpad, does not feature any multi-touch capabilities, like two-finger scrolling.

But before you actually mount your laptop onto this thing, you'll notice a few features on the upper half, namely three horizontally arranged cooling fans that the Cooling Station owes its namesake to. There's a rectangular flap beneath the fans that you push out so it sits obliquely on an adjustable plastic panel behind the system, sort of like a picture frame; adjusting the flap's tilt in turn alters the viewing angle of the laptop screen. There's a removable plastic window to the left of the flap that opens up to reveal a built-in USB 2.0 cable that powers the Cooling System's fans.

To the left of the keyboard are three additional ports: there's a micro USB port for connecting the keyboard and touchpad to your laptop (via the included USB 2.0 cable), as well as two available USB 2.0 ports for connecting additional peripherals. Annoyingly, the micro USB port and the built-in USB cable are both located on the Cooling Station's left side, so if there aren't any USB ports on the left side of your laptop, it'll take some patience and creativity to hook the Cooling System to your Laptop; this problem is exacerbated by the fact that both the included USB cable and the built-in cable are only 21 inches long and, consequently, offer very little slack.

Performance
Although the Sharper Image Cooling Station's three cooling fans performed decently and succeeded in lowering my laptop's temperature by 2 degrees Celsius after a few minutes, its built-in keyboard and touchpad must also be considered since the three are inextricably linked and, in appraising the item holistically, the good must also be evaluated in addition to the bad. And, man, there's plenty of that going on here.

Despite Sharper Image's claims that the Cooling Station increases productivity, I found the opposite to be true in actual practice. The combination of a tiny palm rest that forces your hands off the edges and flimsy plastic material made typing on the Cooling Station's built-in keyboard an exceedingly difficult and frustrating endeavor. While the Cooling Station's keyboard succeeds in emulating the MacBook Pro's aesthetic, it doesn't come anywhere near the latter in terms of quality and performance. The Cooling Station's stiff and clacky keys are almost entirely devoid of springiness. Unlike the better, equally portable Evoluent Essentials Keyboard (EKB), there are no hot keys whatsoever. Only the most basic keys are here. Even standard, fairly ubiquitous function keys like screen brightness and volume control haven't been included. These omissions paradoxically force you to return to your laptop's now-vertically positioned keyboard to access these keys even while another keyboard sits directly in front of you, thus begging the question: why even bother using this keyboard at all, especially when your laptop almost invariably comes equipped with a better one? Those looking for a portable keyboard to use in addition to their laptop's would be much better served by the significantly cheaper Verbatim Mini Wireless SlimBoard Keyboard & Mouse ($30 street, 3 stars), which also boasts wireless connectivity, or the Evoluent Essentials (EKB) since it's practically the same size as the Cooling Station's built-in keyboard and also sports hot keys that would actually succeed in increasing productivity.

It doesn't help that the keyboard lacks rigidity and give off an overwhelming sensation of cheapness. The shallow area where the keys are located feels disconcertingly hollow, and typing on it with a normal level of intensity yielded a noticeable amount of bending beneath the weight of rapid keystrokes. Overall, the Cooling Station made for an unpleasant typing experience. The cramped keyboard served as a prelude to the even more cramped and equally limited touchpad. Its responsiveness was average at best and its left- and right- click buttons were stiff and clunky. As mentioned earlier, there aren't any multi-touch capabilities on the touchpad. As was the case with the Cooling Station's keyboard, you'd very likely be better off using your laptop's touchpad, or with a mouse-keyboard combination like the Verbatim Mini Wireless SlimBoard Keyboard & Mouse or its full-sized counterpart, the Verbatim Wireless Slim Keyboard and Mouse ($63.00 direct, 3 stars).

In the end, the Sharper Image Cooling Station's lack of focus seals its fate. It's a cooling system that harbors aspirations of being a keyboard, and it consequently performs poorly as whole. Even if it didn't come with an inflated price tag, its odd design and lackluster keyboard and touchpad make for a strange, entirely half-baked product you're better off avoiding.

Go for the automated tie rack instead.

Compare the Sharper Image Cooling Station with several other keyboards side by side.

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