ASOTVI Review of The Giovanni Roll Out Keyboard

What is it? A portable keyboard/synthesizer with a rubber keyboard that can be rolled up.

Rating: Works As Advertised

Major Claims:

• Fun, compact and convenient
• SensiTouch™ Keys for True Piano Feeling
• 200 Sounds

This product is about as portable as a keyboard can be. Traditional keyboards, even the smallest ones made, if they offer four full octaves of standard sized piano keys as this product does, can be rather large and aren’t something you can easily put into a purse or backpack. This one can. Its most unique feature is that the keyboard itself is a sheet of rubber that rolls around the main computer unit to about the size of a book when not in use. When played, the keyboard takes up the same surface area as would four octaves of piano keys, plus the computer unit attached to the end of the right side.

The system comes with the keyboard, a microphone, headphones, an overlay for the keyboard with the notes written on them for learning, two CDs, sheet music, a learning guide, an operators manual, and a carrying bag for the keyboard.

It was indeed quite entertaining to play with. Its internal speaker isn’t a professional sound system, and that was to be understood, but it was perfectly adequate to hear what was being played, as illustrated in our video. The system offers external outputs, including a MIDI output as well as headphone jacks, to play the piano through a computer system, synthesizer, or stereo.

The product does have 200 possible sounds, but that includes a library of 100 voices (or instruments) and 100 rhythms. Any rhythm accompaniment can be applied to any of the voices, so technically that’s 10,000 different combinations. It also has additional effects such as Reverb, Vibrato, and Sustain. Rhythm accompaniment also has a tempo adjusting and synchronizing capability.

All in all, this product was observed to be a very full featured keyboard for its price. The least expensive keyboards that offer at least four octaves of keys typically start at twice as expensive as this particular product, and can average hundreds, if not over a thousand dollars or more.

As to this product’s claim of having a “true piano feeling” this statement is true only in the sense of the keys being the same size as standard piano keys. That is, if you play the piano and the muscle memory in your fingers is trained to play particular chords, runs, or for example a left hand thumb and pinky octave, your fingers will find the right keys at the right distances from each other.

However, the keys themselves feel nothing whatsoever like a “real” piano keys. As expected, they feel like pressing a flat piece of rubber, not a smooth piece of white ivory or ebony that depresses below the surface of the rest of the keys, sensitive to attack velocity with which it’s stuck, with the ability to control volume, intensity, sustain, dynamics, etc. There are some electronic keyboards and synthesizers that do have “true piano feel” in their keys, inclusive of weighting, attack velocity sensitivity, etc. but they are typically quite expensive professional keyboards.

We did observe one other performance aspect of this product that is worth noting. It is very important that the product be placed on a hard surface for it to work properly. When placed on a table with a thick tablecloth on it, some of the contacts in the keyboard didn’t register when the keys were pressed. But when it was placed on a hard surface, such as the glass tabletop in our video, it worked just fine. This is an understandable observation, given that the rubber keyboard is a series of contact switches that are normally in the “off” position, and when pressed, make contact and are “on.” If there isn’t sufficient resistance from beneath the keyboard, proper contact pressure can’t be made.

Much of the materials that come with this product are for learning to play the piano, and no evaluation was made by ASOTVI as to the merits of the learning program, only the functionality of the product itself. However, one aspect of this product is most noteworthy with respect to any parents who are possibly toying with the idea of having your child learn to play the piano, or even wishing to learn yourself. Whether you or your child learns to play with the materials included with the product, or if you sign up for lessons from a piano instructor, if you can’t practice, you’ll never learn to play. This product gives you a means to both learn and practice very inexpensively—and that’s key (no pun intended).

The fact is, a piano happens to be one of those musical instruments where the “entry cost to participate” isn’t trivial. The least expensive real pianos can be quite expensive, as can electronic keyboards and synthesizers, as we’ve noted. This product represents a very low “barrier to entry” cost to give keyboard playing a try. You really don’t want to pay several thousand dollars for a new piano for your child to learn to play, only to find out shortly thereafter they don’t care for it and you’re then stuck with a very expensive, albeit lovely knickknack table.

For those who already play the piano, from beginners to professionals, having a product like this available might be invaluable not only for convenient practice, but also when song-writing inspiration hits—i.e. to be able to work out a melody or riff, especially when you’re far away from a full-sized instrument.

For what it is and can do, we found this product works as advertised.

ASOTVI Review of The Original Poker Chip Customizer

What is it? A poker chip labeling system, which includes design software on CD, 700 labels, 300 poker chips, two decks of cards, a dealer token, 5 dice, a label centering guide, all in a very nice metal, locking carrying case.

A set of nice poker chips (clay, not plastic) can easily run $50 or more. Having them professionally customized with a logo or other art can cost hundreds of dollars. This system gives you everything you need, including a very nice metal carrying case, for around $60.

The chips themselves are top-of-the line, clay-composite, heavy, and imprinted with dice figures, in five colors (white, red, green, blue, and black). The set is augmented with two decks of cards, and a set of five dice (red translucent with white dots).

The labeling kit works very similar to any CD labeling kit you may have ever used. The kit comes with a software CD that installs the design program. The design program itself is actually a fairly sophisticated piece of software, with a myriad of features, options and capabilities. It offers some simple wizards for quick production, or with a little patience to explore and learn the program, you can pretty much have any image design you can imagine. It isn’t as complicated as Adobe Photoshop, but very feature rich.

You can choose to create your poker chip labels from a large library of samples included with the software, in a variety of colors and styles, or from many templates for just about any occasion or scenario. We chose to customize our evaluation set of chips with the ASOTVI logo.

The design program allowed us to select our graphic image and resize it to our needs, as well as add other text, in our case our website URL and company name. After a bit of trial and error and experimentation we came up with a design we liked and it was time to print.

The first time you print your labels you’ll need to calibrate your printer, and the software is prepared for this. You print out a test page and adjust the calibration settings until you get a clean page where all the printed labels line up with the label stickers. Once that’s achieved, you print your labels, peel and stick.

Please note that these are white, paper labels, photo-quality, similar to many of the photo-quality labels you might be familiar with from an office supply store; therefore, we’d caution you to avoid getting your finished chips wet after you’re done, as standard ink from an inkjet printer can potentially smudge or bleed if it gets wet. If you’re concerned about that possibility at all (drinks can spill at poker parties!), we’d suggest applying some kind of clear sealant on them, or transparent sticker, if you can find one of an appropriate size.

The customizer kit comes with a centering guide to ensure you get your labels perfectly centered on each chip. The labels themselves are 15/16ths of an inch in diameter each. The set comes with enough to do both sides of the 300 chips included with the set, with 100 labels to spare (in case you make a mistake). Each of the ten pages of labels included holds 70 labels (ten rows of 7). The vendor offers additional labels and chips if needed – see their website for details.

So whether it’s for poker night with friends, a company event, a fund-raiser, a special gift, or just for fun, this product was found to be top quality and produces an excellent and highly custom result.