Hands-on: Key Smart

Key Smart is a crowdfunding project from the evil empire of America. What it does is use a two-steel-plate module to conveniently organize your keyring.

When I bought it, the official site still had a 30% OFF discount, but there are a few things I need to tell anyone who comes after me:

1. This thing ships from the US by surface mail, which means it’ll probably take 20–30 days to reach China.
2. You absolutely must write the address in pinyin, not Chinese characters. If you write it in Chinese, it won’t arrive — at least, there’s no precedent of anyone receiving one that way.
3. If too many of your keys have plastic heads, this thing probably isn’t for you.
4. For official accessories, I’d suggest buying just one of the hanging clips. The rest are a rip-off. That USB drive — Kingston on JD has cheaper ones.

So what arrived was this envelope:

Unfortunately I also have keys with those plastic heads. There are solutions. For example, if you make sure there’s a hole behind the plastic part, you can burn the plastic off with a lighter and leave the metal part, and then it’ll fit in.

If that’s not possible, you can improvise. For instance, some keys to cabinets at work that are rarely used — you can lock the cabinet keys inside one cabinet and just carry the key to that cabinet. Basically, lock up the keys, then use the key to open the lock and get the keys.

Another method is to buy the official replacement keys and have someone cut a copy using them.

Assembly is pretty simple. The finished product looks like this.

The last thing I want to say is: if you want one of these, there’s really no need to buy it from the US. Taobao has plenty, genuine or knockoff.