Wooting confirms 60HE v2 pre-order launch date and reveals details for 80HE Zinc case fix
Shortly after Wooting announced the 80HE analogue gaming keyboard, the company started receiving reports and complaints from users about peeling coatings on its zinc case. It has since conducted testing and verified that those issues were related to the coating reacting to chemicals in the sweat of a small number of "sweaty gamers."
Most recently, however, Wooting co-founder, Calder Limmen, has published an update regarding the case issues and giving gamers and idea of how the company plans to address those coating issues going forward. Limmen has confirmed that the updated 80HE zinc case coating will be an e-coating process, a common enough coating in the keyboard space — and likely similar to the coating on the Keychron Q13 Max we reviewed. While e-coating can be incredibly durable, it can also be difficult to nail down a consistent finish.
However, durability testing has revealed that the e-coating process, while more chemical-resistant than the original zinc coating, is still susceptible to certain hand lotion formulations, which would leave long-lasting residues and stains on the case when it came into contact with the coating. As such, Wooting has confirmed that the new zinc coating is still a way out, with an initial six-month timeframe now seeming optimistic. That said, Wooting is trying to tackle a technically dense problem that affects a very small portion of its user base, so there was never going to be an overnight fix.
Wooting 60HE v2 expected shipping and general availability date
With the launch of Wooting's Switchy's Space Bar Heist mini-game, the 60HE v2's landing page officially confirmed that the new 60HE v2 will be available for pre-order on November 6, 2025, although no pricing has yet been teased or confirmed. It has been confirmed that the 60HE v2 will be sold alongside the original 60HE, so a price increase is expected for the new high-performance gaming keyboard.
With the launch of the 80HE, Wooting also made pre-orders available ahead of the launch, although it suffered a number of production setbacks that meant the first pre-order batches only started shipping to buyers in November 2024, more than 6 months after the conclusion of the Founder program. However, Wooting is approaching the 60HE v2 a little differently compared to its 80% keyboard, in the sense that Wooting has applied much of the R&D from the 80HE to the 60HE v2.
As we've previously discussed, Wooting has already identified and solved an issue that it was facing with the 60HE v2's case finishing and coating. What this all means is that Wooting will likely be able to meet its goal of shipping the 60HE v2 before the end of 2025, as promised. That said, having pre-orders ship after November 6 but before the end of the year would shorten the time between pre-order and shipment drastically compared to the 80HE.
The Wooting 60HE v2 is slated to bring many of the advancements and features we liked in our review of the Wooting 80HE, like 8 kHz polling and a gasket mount, to the smaller form factor, as well as introduce a split space layout to Wooting's keyboard line-up.
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