Symmetry Tide Desktop Riser Sneak Preview

Coming Soon!

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The Tide is a new sit-stand workstation from Symmetry, a well-known player in the contract furniture industry. The Tide sports a number of features that, on paper at least, make it seem like a competitive product in this category. While we work on a more comprehensive review, check out the quick preview of this new desktop riser below.

The Tide attaches to your desk by clamping on the front edge. It has a continuous range of adjustment (that means you can lock the platform at any point along the range instead of at preset intervals) that starts five inches below your regular desk surface and ends sixteen inches above it — that’s a total range of twenty-one inches. For comparison consider that our current experts’ choice in this category, the Kangaroo, has a sixteen and a half inch range of vertical adjustment. The Tide has two weight ranges for monitors: light (5-15lb) and heavy (15-24lbs). It can be purchased with a dual monitor bar allowing you to use two monitors while you work. These specs are about on par with other sit-stand risers we’ve reviewed. Perhaps most exciting, and a feature we don’t often see, is the Tide’s built-in, adjustable keyboard tray that permits up to fifteen degrees of negative tilt. When standing to type, many users find that a negative keyboard tilt lets them work in a more comfortable and ergonomically correct typing position.

The Tide has a nice warranty; five years on the gas cylinder (used to make adjustment easier), two years on the palm rest, and an impressive ten years on everything else. We view a product’s warranty as a statement of a manufacturer’s confidence in their product. This warranty leads us to suspect that Symmetry designed the Tide to last. The Tide’s two-week lead time places its time to delivery near the head of the pack of risers we’ve reviewed. What’s more, when you open the box you’ll find the Tide already assembled. Just clamp it down and get to work.

We first field-tested a prototype the Tide at the ErgoExpo conference in December 2014. Our only concern with the product was an excessive amount of instability in the vertical axis, which the company said they were working on improving. We’re awaiting an official review unit so we can get right down to the nuts and bolts of this thing and give you our usual fully-detailed lab analysis. In the meantime, read up on some of the other risers we’ve reviewed like the Kangaroo, QuickStand, or WorkFit-S. To stay abreast of all our new product reviews, expert advice and blog articles, please be sure to subscribe to our free newsletter.