Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C and Dell MS355 Silent Mouse Review: Quiet Productivity Tools

The Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C and Dell MS355 Silent Mouse are certainly quiet, if that’s what your office really needs.

Score: 3.5/5

In this review

Design
Performance
Conclusion

While Dell is best known for its wide range of laptops and desktops (and a whole host of enterprise-level tech gear), it’s also offered up a range of computing peripherals for a long time now. You don’t have to be a Dell customer to buy them – though I suspect the vast majority of sales are to compliment an existing Dell purchase.

Dell’s latest offerings to land on my review desk are the Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C and Dell MS355 Silent Mouse, very specifically tailored towards the kinds of business users who are endlessly stuck in video conference meetings — and who don’t want to make a lot of noise while doing so.

Design

The Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C is a rather generic looking offering, rather like something that you might pick up as a discount store-brand keyboard if you were desperate for just anything to type on.

It measures 122.17×432.82×26.16mm and weighs 485.1g, not that most tethered keyboards get hefted around all that much. Within that space you get a full keyboard, number pad, twelve function keys and four specific keys for video conferencing functions, located just above the number pad. Those buttons cover off video and microphone functions, screen sharing and chat within Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

You also get a choice of connectivity, with a fixed USB cable that has a split end for connection to either USB-C or USB-A ports on a Windows PC. The Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C will function as a keyboard on a Mac – I tested just because I’m curious — but those additional function keys won’t do you any good outside of a Windows environment.

If I’m describing the Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C as being generic, then I’m going to need a new term to describe the Dell MS355 Silent Mouse, because it’s even more generic again. It’s a very simple rounded wireless mouse with a top that lifts off to reveal its single AA battery and 2.4Ghz receiver at the top, while at the bottom houses the power switch and a button for choosing between 2.4Ghz and Bluetooth connection modes.

The battery is stated to be good for up to 36 months. No, I haven’t been able to test that claim out just yet. Check back with me in three years time and I may be able to update you.

One factor I did appreciate was how subtle the branding is across both devices. A lot of maker-specific gear gets big shiny logos on it, but both keyboard and mouse only show off their Dell origins on their undersides — and who spends any serious time looking underneath keyboards aside from tech journalists?

Both the Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C and MS355 Silent Mouse rely on decent quantities of post-consumer recycled plastic, with Dell claiming that the mouse has up to 64% PCR, while the keyboard ever so slightly edges it out with up to 65% PCR. The tech industry doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to environmental responsibility, so it’s nice to see this kind of initiative in play.

The flip side of this is that neither the keyboard or mouse feel all that robust, and that makes me wonder about long term durability. Having 36 months of battery life on the mouse might not matter that much if it breaks before three years is up.

Performance

Plug either the Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C or connect the Dell MS355 Silent Mouse to a Windows PC, and you’ll be prompted to install Dell’s Peripheral Manager application to control them. You don’t have to install it if there’s issues with a locked-down work PC, but without it you can’t configure the function keys on the keyboard or the polling rate of the mouse.

Both the Collaboration Keyboard KB525C and MS355 Silent Mouse are pitched as being “silent” peripherals, and while this isn’t 100% true – there’s still a very small amount of noise from the keys or from the mouse buttons – it’s certainly a welcome relief if you’ve ever worked in an office where someone with a mechanical keyboard attacks it making sounds not unlike a machine gun.

Mea Culpa: That person in the office typing at a rate of knots and sounding like a World War I warfront was probably me; I could have used the Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C at that point, I suspect.

The collaboration keys on the Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C are backlit so you can tell when they’re in or out of use. While you can use Dell’s software to assign alternate productivity functions to each key, you can’t do so with the collaboration keys, which feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to further expand their collaborative use.

Sure, videoconferencing via Zoom and Teams is very much part of a lot of people’s workdays now, and that’s not likely to change any time soon, but being able to make even more use of the keyboard might have been nice here. They’re totally fit for purpose, but also rather specific as a result. If you spend your entire working life in video meetings they could be a real boon.

Of the two, I definitely prefer the keyboard to the mouse. There’s nothing wrong with the mouse on a PC – though for some weird reason its 2.4Ghz receiver misbehaves badly on a Mac with intermittent dropouts. To be fair it’s not designed for Mac use, but I’ve never hit that kind of issue with simple peripherals like mice before.

The bigger issue here I feel is that the MS355 Silent Mouse is so very generic beyond its quiet nature. Being able to assign a function to the scroll wheel click isn’t terribly innovative for a mouse these days, and neither is changing up the DPI.

Also read:
HyperX PulseFire Haste 2 Mouse Review

This doesn’t make the MS355 Silent Mouse bad, but it’s certainly less compelling than the keyboard is; the kind of tech that you’d be assigned on day one of a new corporate desk job because someone in purchasing signed off on a thousand of them, rather than a personalised working tool.

Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C and Dell MS355 Silent Mouse: Alex’s Verdict

The Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C and Dell MS355 Silent Mouse are decent peripherals, though they’re not likely to be the kinds of mouse and keyboard combos that truly excite too many folks.

The keyboard is a little better and nicer than the mouse in my estimation, because the combinaton of very silent and accurate typing along with those specific video collaboration keys could be quite compelling for some very specific workflows. The mouse on the other hand feels just a tad too generic, though if you do work somewhere where keeping quiet while you work is an absolute must, that could make it more interesting to you.

Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C and Dell MS355 Silent Mouse: Pricing and availability

Dell products are nearly always on perpetual sale cycles, but at the time of writing, the Dell Wired Collaboration Keyboard KB525C costs $61.60 delivered, while the Dell MS355 Silent Mouse costs $51.70 delivered.

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