Milwaukee 2705 – One Key Drill

As you know Milwaukee tool has come out with a new technology called One-Key.  The new Milwaukee 2705 is one of the first of many releases of the One-Key.  They do have a couple other tools out such as the hammer drill, impact driver, impact wrench and the Force Logic, but we will be covering those in different articles.  Since this is our first look at the One-Key solution, we are going to talk more about this new feature than the drill.  If you are interested in the drill, you can take a look at our review of the 2704, which is one bad a** drill.  If you are here to look at the Milwaukee 2705 as a drill, check out our article on the Milwaukee 2704.  The 2704 is pretty much the same drill except it doesn’t offer the One-Key solution the Milwaukee 2705 offers.  So what is One-Key?

Milwaukee 2705 One-Key

One-Key is a new and innovative way to truly make your power tool, yours.  Before the One-Key, you have always had to use your drill the way the manufacturer had set it up.  Tool companies are always trying to increase speed and torque of a drill to push the limits.  However speed and torque work against each other.  You can make a really speedy drill, but the torque will decrease.  As you increase the torque of a drill, the speed will decrease.  So every manufacturer has to find a point where the speed and torque are optimal.  While this is great for a majority of people in the field, it’s just not a solution for everyone as some people need more speed and some need more torque.  Let’s face it, your drill is really an extension of you.  So here is what Milwaukee did when they created the One-Key.  They built an app that you can download on your smartphone that allows you to set up the tool the way you want it.  Think of your truck.  A truck manufacturer has to balance fuel mileage with horse power.  So what do we do to change this?  We buy an after market chip that lets us customize the way we use our trucks.  If we are taking a road trip, we want to change the settings to offer the best gas mileage because we don’t care about horsepower and torque.  However if we are hauling a heavy trailer, we don’t need speed, we need torque and horsepower.  This is exactly how the One-Key works.  As a side note the One-Key also does inventory management and reporting, but we will get into that in a different article.  For now we are sticking to tool control.

Is the One-Key for everyone?  No, definitely not.  However there is a market for a lot of people.  Let’s say you are doing a certain application all day long.  Now you will be able to change the settings of your drill to match this redundant work.  Say you are putting sheet metal screw in.  Instead of messing with the trigger and slowly ramping it up to drive the screw home, you can now change the setting.  You can set it so when you press the trigger all the way in, the tool will slowly ramp up for 3 seconds, then drive the screw in.  So in essence what One-Key is really doing is making your work more consistent and helping you complete your task quicker.

Now I know that a lot of people are complaining this is just a marketing ploy by Milwaukee tools and I get it.  For some people, they will never need this technology.  Again for some other people, this is a huge leap forward.  This is only something you can decide if the price increase or the new investment is worth it to you.  Check out our video below to see a little bit about how the software works.

Check out the stats – Thanks to Comp56