Keycaps are GMK Art
I have frequent bouts of insomnia. Turning off my brain at night is incredibly difficult. If I try to go to bed early, if I’m even able to force myself to fall asleep before midnight with the help of sleep aids, I’ll still wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake until dawn. I see the sunrise so often it actually has become a sort of comfort, a sleep trigger all on its own.
One night a few weeks ago, I woke up around 4am. I had an idea in my head. A soft keyboard. I hadn’t built a keyboard in years, but I had remembered a silicone board I had seen a few months prior. I could not shake it out of my head, so I got up, went to my office, and looked it up.
This is why I’m single, by the way. If you’ve never woken up a girlfriend shaking her awake to shout, “Babe, have you ever thought about building silicone keyboards?!” then you probably have never been broken up with at 5am and had to sleep in your office chair after buying keyboards.
After some playing around, I decided to try a few ideas I had been thinking of. GMK keycaps, FR4 plate, GMK’s QMK stabilizers, and these insane switches from Zeal that warranted their own review.
My middle of the night whim was finally delivered about two weeks after I ordered, due to shipping issues. Yes, ordered. I bought this with my own money, if it wasn’t clear. This review was not sponsored, I was not paid, and I told no one I was reviewing anything. Honestly, that’s my M.O. unless I say otherwise. With the Hibi June in hand, and an easy build finished, it was time to start reviewing.
In This Article:
Specs, as Tested
- 60%, Split Backspace
- Width: 320.5mm
- Height: 119.5mm
- Front Height/Depth: 21.5mm
- Rear Depth: 31.5mm
- Angle: 4º
- Weight as a complete: 816g, made with 1 artisan, cherry profile keycaps, Zeal Clickiez, and plate foam.
The Build Process
But this case is not made out of aluminum or plastic.
Thanks to the silicone construction, the June can break the traditional wisdom, or at least bend it a little. This is a simple keyboard. Put the plate together with the PCB, slap some foam between, if you have it (the kit doesn’t come with it), and it’ll just be four screws to install it. The screws don’t seem to be magnetic, which is a drawback, but not an overly difficult one.
In order to kind of give these standoffs some more room over the other standoffs in the bottom of the case, I did add a small amount of foam and thin stick-on gaskets to the posts with screws. I just wanted to provide a little bit of flexibility for this board. I also did not screw the screws all the way down, giving them about 1 full turn each from a loosely tightened position. The board, especially with the plate foam, does not flex much, but it has a greater chance to with these small tweaks.
Personally, I’d have loved to see an o-ring mounting system with this. Not only would it be flexible, I feel like the silicone would be perfect for it. Just nothing but silicone holding everything in place. I think that would be fantastic for a future version. It also would be easier to disassemble than messing with screws. You could just peel the case away enough to get leverage and pull the keyboard out of the silicone tray! Perhaps they could have gotten away with just two screws too. Regardless, it’s an incredibly simple build, and would make an excellent first build for any beginner.
Layout
The PCB on this is a Wilba.tech PCB, complete with hotswap sockets to make changing switches a breeze. This has a number of options available for the layout, including different bottom row configurations and key sizes, a split backspace, and a split shift. You can easily make your own HHKB-style setup, or go with a smaller spacebar and more modifier keys. I’d love to see this with blocked off control keys, like an HHKB, especially since it could still use a full-sized PCB and plate thanks to the flexibility of silicone. Thin pieces of silicone could easily just hang over the bottom corners of the PCB.
There is no backlighting on this board, but I have come to accept that it’s just not something I need in a board. I’d prefer great construction, or at least highly unique construction, like that of this cute little board.
Design
It’s a cute board, with cute branding, and everything about it tells you not to not take things too seriously. As a Type A who’s in denial about being a Type A (even as I write this), I need a little reminder to take a deep breath and ease into something. This is a keyboard you ease into. It’s a silly little experiment into thinking outside of the box with keyboards, and it’s clever at that.
There are a number of colorways, often done in collaboration with other members of the community. Mine was a collaboration with Evil AI. I like red, I swear that I, unlike Apple, have not teamed up with any evil AIs! There are versions with Witch Girl and Henchmen right now too. If I didn’t get this bright red color, I likely would have opted for the Fairy Bread colorway, which is designed after the snack it’s named for. It has little sprinkles right in the case itself. Again, adorable. Although, personally, I’d expect some more sprinkles on my fairy bread. If I’m going to be eating sugar, I’m going all-out.
Practicality of the Design
The first keyboard case you can peel back!
This is cute, but it isn’t like one of my little fandom figurines. This isn’t my adorable Porg Funko Pops, sitting on my desk just being cute. It’s a keyboard. It serves a purpose, or at least, it’s supposed to. So how does the design play into it as a real keyboard?
The first thing I noticed is that it’s flatter than most of my keyboards. I’ve noticed angles on boards hover around 5-7º. A bit of an angle makes it easier to type fast, but too much can make you angle your wrists too much as you’re typing, leading to wrist pain or over-reliance on your wrist rest. The June comes in at 4º. It’s shallow, but I found I was able to easily get over 110 wpm on it, which is around my average. You may want to go with keycaps with angled rows, instead of uni-profile keycaps. I’m mostly using Cherry profile these days, but I think HSA or OEM could work well here as well. I’ve distanced myself from taller profiles of late, despite loving how they look, but SA or MT3 would work well here as well, giving you just a little bit more differentiation in each row, hopefully improving your typing speed.
The silicone makes it durable and lightweight. It also makes it easy to peel back the case to see the board. I dropped one of the screws and realized I could just peel back the silicone a little to get to it and fix its location to screw in right. I had a piece of foam not quite right on the top row, so I just peeled back the case a little and pushed it back in. However, it’s also silicone. It’s grippy, which keeps it on your desk firmly, but it also will collect dust. Fortunately, you can clean it with a damp cloth, as long as you don’t get it anywhere near the electronics, or just take the electronics out and carefully clean it. It definitely shows dirt faster than other boards. When I wouldn’t even think about dust on one of my boards it’s already all on the bottom of this one and a bit on the edges. However, it’s easy enough to clean if you’re not too picky.
It’s a unique case with a fun theme. There are definitely drawbacks, but they’re easier to notice because we don’t think about the drawbacks of other constructions as much. Nothing’s perfect for everyone, but silicone is a surprisingly good case material.
Sound
Tray mount boards are when the plate and PCB are secured directly to the case with screws. I’ve made plenty of boards like this before gasket mounting became a thing. One of my earlier ones even used an aluminum case with a brass plate and weight. I even had the audacity to use Holy Pandas in it, making it loud, pingy, and tough to type on. I still like to use it sometimes, but definitely have to go back and tune it better.
Despite the shortcomings of tray mounts, this design certainly reduces them. Think about it, we normally put these plats on some kind of foam, sometimes silicone, to dampen the sound. This entire case is silicone! This softens all the sounds coming from the board, even the sharp clicky sound from these switches. The end result dulls any thock, but lets the clack through, without sounding too sharp.
I liked these Gateron Quinn switches I used in it, so I decided to try them in a different board. The comparison was shocking. The other board I was able to customize further, giving the Quinn’s a thocky, almost marbly sound. On this, however, they clack more. It’s more high-pitched, silencing the thock. This is in part due to the FR4 plate, as well as the mounting. The silicone of the case absorbs deeper, more resonant sounds, and you just get the clack of the plastic. Some people really like that sound. It’s not necessarily jarring, after all. However, some may wish it preserved the resonance of the key switches a little more. I’m more in the latter camp. I think this would be best for mellowing out more clacky switches, or bringing out the clackiness of thocky switches. It seems to average switches towards a central point, clacky, but manageable.
Typing Feel
Continuing a long tradition of making the worst choices because I wanted to try a few techniques at once, I put Clickiez switches in this keyboard. I love clicky switches. The little click just reminds me of old typewriters and keyboards. There’s a sharp tactility to clicky switches, which I really enjoy.
They are not good on this setup.
Clickiez, as a switch, needed a full review for me to discuss everything that’s wrong with them. However, what we will talk about is how they feel when they bottom out. I usually try to barely bottom out, but some switches, like linear switches, long pole stem tactiles, and these Clickiez, encourage it. This is not a board to bottom out on.
The tray mount means there’s not much play when you bottom out the switch. You just hit a hard surface. It’s FR4, which is the same material the PCB is made out of, and is lightly flexible. It’s not as soft as polycarbonate or POM, but not rigid either. Still, it’s mounted directly to the tray, and doesn’t flex much. If you’re using a switch that bottoms out easily, this will be especially jarring. I’d recommend a softer switch. The Boba U4 silent switches, or Gateron Baby Kangaroos that I used in another board, would be fantastic in this setup. But these Clickiez? Basically a war crime. It wasn’t just tough to type on, it became unbearable.
Then again, that’s more to do with the Clickiez than anything else. I think the Clickiez would be more comfortable to use on a board with a bit more cushioning, but this isn’t it.
With Gateron Quinns
Fortunately, I ditched the Clickiez. I instead decided to try a switch similar to the Gateron Baby Kangaroos I had liked on another setup, the Gateron Quinns. These are basically the same switch, but with a softer top housing, nylon instead of polycarbonate. The difference makes the sound a little more muted. I thought that would be best for this keyboard, which tends to turn thockiness into more of a clack or marble-like sound.
These switches certainly improve the feeling of bottoming out, but you’ll want to stay away from it. I am more used to typing hard, and on this keyboard, I have to remind myself of how uncomfortable that is. The plate and tray mount combine to make a surprisingly stiff setup, for a keyboard made of silicone. Still, it was nice to see that, with more forgiving switches than the Clickiez, I could still make a decent setup with this silly keyboard.
Shipping, Company Relations
This does ship from Australia, so depending on where you are, you may be looking at a long shipping time. This is made worse by the company shipping out their orders on Fridays. After not shipping for over a week, after being told it would ship within 3-5 days, I found out that the keyboard I ordered was in stock, they just missed shipping it out. It was out the next week, with a “surprise” in the box. I presume this was the sticker pack, which now adorn my eGPU on my desk. Fluffy cloud puppers. The stickers are a nice touch. Shipping is never all that fast in the keyboard industry, I think it’s a method to keep us from destroying our bank accounts with impulse purchases. Two weeks is hardly a big deal. I have friends who are waiting years for keycaps!
Aside from that, I should note that it ships in a branded box. It’s cute, all the little Hibi puffballs on the outside, making their little faces. However, if you’re like me and have had packages stolen by the companies doing the shipping, I could see someone preferring the outer box was less cute. More plain. If someone knew what’s inside, the value of the keyboard to the community that would pay hundreds of dollars for this gear, they might steal it.
And the Rest…
The Hibi website may be hurting their sales. On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with it. However, there are auto-play videos showing exploded or rotating views of the products. This chews through CPU time on desktop, and makes the mobile website all but unusable. I really wish they’d change that, it made shopping incredibly frustrating.
Overall
Hibi also makes the keycap, their “It’s About Time.” It combines my love of keyboards and watches. In fact, it looks a bit like one I could never afford…
It was a bout of insomnia that lead to me buying this keyboard, and it has offered me comfort. Both in that night, giving me something to occupy my mind with for a few minutes as I made a build and later fell asleep, and later, actually on my desk. It’s cute. A neat little build that feels more like a fun project than most of my keyboard builds. Usually I’m going to make something that will stand the test of time, something that is weighty, high-end, durable. Instead, I made something whimsical, and that’s a nice change of pace. I need more whimsy.
It does have a unique sound, and the tray mount isn’t for me. However, I’m still glad I put it together. It was a fun project, and I look forward to coming up with ways to make it more my own. Perhaps I’ll try some other mounting styles, see what I can do to make it feel more forgiving to my often too hard pressing. A bit more soft. It’s ironic that a board made of a soft material would be so rigid.
The final product isn’t one of my favorite keyboards. I just don’t like a firm typing feel. But it was a fun build and it’s a cute finished product. It’s got potential too. Maybe it’ll make a decent in-office keyboard if I ever return to one. Until then, it’s an oddity I’ll have on one of my keyboard shelves, to come down on occasion when I want to type on something poppy and rigid. It’s a keyboard that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and reminds me to do the same. For that, I love it.