I’ve craved an external keyboard for my iPhone for awhile now, but assumed that the phone lacked the technical hooks third-party manufacturers needed to make a keyboard talk to it. Here, however, is the first iPhone keyboard I’ve seen. It’s not the folding Think Outside-style model I’ve been envisioning, but I’m going to try and check it out here at CES.
Tag Archives | Keyboards
Lenovo Quietly Introduces Keyboard Remote
For those of us with home theater PCs, Lenovo’s latest product release may be quite useful. The Chinese electronics maker has quietly released the Multimedia Remote with Keyboard, which looks perfect for those who find using a full-sized keyboard in the living room a bit cumbersome. The device is selling for $59.99, and currently is showing about a two-week shipping time on the company’s website.
Lenovo says the device will have about a 10-meter (33 feet) range, and will use 2.4GHz wireless technology to communicate with the PC. The main feature obviously is the full QWERTY “palm-sized” keyboard, and a trackball that controls mouse movement, although it does include multimedia controls (play, rewind, fast forward, etc.) across the top — an obvious necessity for its target market.
Thanks to a little sleuthing and Google, we’ve found a code — USPCD36336 — which apparently lowers the price to $29.99 with free shipping. Maybe that’s the reason for the god awful shipping times?
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Swype to Finally Show Up on Omnia II
One of the most impressive demos I’ve seen in the last couple of years–although I’ve seen it only in the form of online video, not in person–is Swype, a form of QWERTY input for phones that was unveiled at last year’s TechCrunch50 conference. It lets you enter text by zigzagging your finger around an onscreen keyboard, and while it’s always dangerous to judge a product based on a demonstration by the guys who created it, it looks neat.
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It’s well over a year later, and Swype is finally showing up on a handset: Samsung’s Omnia II from Verizon, which ships on December 2nd. If Swype is quite as revolutionary as it looks, I’m not sure why it’s taken this long for it to become available–and the Omnia, which runs Windows Mobile 6.5, doesn’t look like a very thrilling phone otherwise. But I plan to sneak into a Verizon store next week and see if I can get some hands-on time…
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The Eternal Virtue of Good Old Fashioned QWERTY
One of my personal heroes in the whole history of technology is Christopher Sholes. He didn’t invent the microprocessor or the LCD or cellular communications–he’s the man who gave the world the first QWERTY keyboard, back in 1867. And even though new approaches to input such as multi-touch screens can be pretty cool, I think that QWERTY will be with us for a long long time to come.
Over at WePC.com, where I’ll be guestblogging periodically, I’ve contributed a post called Physical QWERTY Keyboards: Long May They Wave. Take a look and lemme know what you think: Is Christopher Sholes’ keyboard a gift to cherish forever, or an antiquity we should be trying to ditch?
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A Keyboard That Keeps Going and Going
My friend Mark Evanier has an enjoyable ode today to Northgate keyboards–Northgate being the once-prominent-but-long-defunct PC clone manufacturer that made such great keyboards that folks are still buying, refurbishing, and using them. In an industry built on planned obsolescence–what are netbooks but disposable computers?–it’s pretty cool that there’s at least one product that was so well built that it’s outlived the company that built it by more than a decade and a half–so far.
(Me, I mostly work on notebooks these days and therefore have little say over the keyboard I use–though I like the keyboards on both the MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad that I bought last year, and they were factors in both purchases. The oldest piece of PC gear by far that I still use is a pair of Bose speakers; I got ’em in 1994, and haven’t bought another set since.)