A 25-key USB controller built around portability rather than playing. Sources agree almost completely on what it is good at: it is genuinely pocketable at 325 × 83 × 16 mm and 244 g, it is bus-powered from one cable, and on Mac, iPad and Linux it is class-compliant and works the moment it is plugged in. They agree just as clearly on what it lacks — every control is a button, so there is no fine pitch bend, no modulation sweep, no knob, no fader, no pedal jack and no MIDI out. Opinion splits hard on the keybed: reviewers who compare it with the original nanoKEY or with typing notes on a computer keyboard call it a real improvement, while owners who compare it with a sprung mini-key synth bed find the velocity range too narrow and the action too flat to play dynamically. Build divides the same way, between sturdy-enough-for-a-bag and visibly cheap. Windows setup divides too, and there the cause is documented: the hardware is class-compliant, but Korg's optional Windows USB-MIDI driver is where the trouble lives.
About this product
The 25-key member of Korg's 2011 nanoSERIES2 (model NANOKEY2BK/WH) — flat, velocity-sensitive laptop-style keys in a 16 mm slab, with octave, pitch, modulation and sustain BUTTONS and nothing else. Black and white are the same instrument. Not the 2008 original nanoKEY, not the battery-powered Bluetooth nanoKEY Studio, and not the 2024 foldable nanoKEY Fold. No pads, knobs, faders, wheels, aftertouch, pedal jack or 5-pin MIDI.
Korg's nanoKEY2 has been on sale since 2011, which in computer-music years is roughly forever. It is two octaves of flat, velocity-sensitive keys in a slab 16 mm thick and 244 grams heavy, powered and connected by a single USB cable, with four buttons down the left side standing in for every wheel and knob a bigger controller would have. It was the answer to a narrow question — how do you enter notes into a DAW when there is no room for a keyboard? — and it has stayed the answer long enough that Porter Robinson and Laidback Luke have both been photographed with one.
It is also, by a comfortable margin, the piece of gear in this category that people are most divided about. Across more than a thousand owner ratings the single most-discussed thing about the nanoKEY2 is how the keys feel, and it is the one topic where the comments run two to one against. Everything else — that it fits anywhere, that it just works, that it costs very little — is close to unanimous. The argument is only ever about the keys.
