[tweetmeme] Let me be blunt right up front: if you don’t have a desperate need to keep some of your stuff off the surface of your desk, UBoard is only useful to you as a 3-port USB hub, and it’s not a very good one of those.

The UBoard does exactly what it says on the tin: it gives you space above your keyboard to put the other stuff you’re working on. Conversely, if you’re a laptop user like me, you can put your laptop on it for a little extra height. This is actually my favourite thing about the UBoard. I have a very low desk at work, so the extra height helps prevent me from hunching over my MacBook Pro’s screen. I’m pretty sure it also helps prevent me from getting carpal tunnel—but honestly, if I haven’t developed that by now, it’s probably not gonna happen.

Let’s go back to square one, though.

The UBoard packaging design isn’t bad, although I don’t understand why “Keyboard” gets a capital letter but “office life” doesn’t. Not up to Apple standards, but then it’s not an Apple product.

Some nouns just require a capital letter, I guess.

But look closer: there’s an important message there that’s pretty easy to miss:

“Above picture may be different from the original.”

The picture does indeed differ from what’s in the box. When you get the UBoard, it’s in pieces; think Ikea.

The UBoard arrives in pieces.

Where the version on the box doesn’t seem to have any screws involved, the version I received requires you to screw the sides of the UBoard onto the glass part. The build quality isn’t great: no matter how well you line up the parts, the screwing just doesn’t go well.

Okay, that last line was just to see whether Milind is paying attention when he reads this.

Anyway, the UBoard comes with little plasticky bits to cover the obvious screws. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to get the screws screwed in well enough that the plastic covers fit properly. I suppose you could glue them on, but I personally have just decided to live with the fact that they come flying off at the slightest provocation.

Screwed.

Once it’s together, the UBoard serves its function as—basically—a shelf pretty well. As I said, it’s terrific for giving you a little extra desk space or raising a laptop or monitor off the surface you’re working on. The UBoard is less satisfactory as a USB hub (there’s a built-in cord that connects to your computer, and the USB slots on one side of the UBoard). In several days of testing, it randomly dis- and re-connected my iPhone about thirty times. It’s possible that was an issue with my unit in particular, but between that experience and the necessity of putting it together myself, my confidence in the build quality of the average UBoard isn’t terribly high.

The UBoard doesn’t do anything about cable clutter.

The other major feature of the UBoard is the cup/card holder you can jam into one side or the other. I leave it up to the reader to decide whether putting liquid in a place where it can easily be accidentally knocked over onto their keyboard or laptop is something they feel like doing. Same goes for the slightly bent card slots—if you want to bend your ID or whatever other card you feel the need to keep by your computer, that’s your business. Personally, I just left that bit off when constructing my UBoard.

I use a mug at work; it’s the wrong shape and a little bit too heavy.

My last comment about the UBoard is about its design. I find it reasonably attractive, but there’s more than a hint of ’80s futurism in the combination of clean white plastic and glass—the UBoard wouldn’t feel entirely out of place on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. My feeling is that within ten years, movie studios will be using things that look like this as props to illustrate that a film takes place in the noughts. It’s not a bad design, per se; it’s just a design that will become dated very quickly.

Sorry about the photo quality; all I have at the moment is my iPhone camera.

I don’t think I could bring myself to spend $50 on the UBoard unless I had some very specific desk organisation needs. Nevertheless, you can find ‘em at the Pyramid distribution store or Amazon if you want one.