The Optimus Mini Keyboard

Zugok writes "We all remember the Optimus Keyboard from last year. Now Art Lebedev and his team have designed the Optimus Mini Three keyboard. The 'Mini Three' builds on the idea of those extraneous keys on modern Logitech and Microsoft Keyboards but like the Optimus Keyboard utilises OLED technology for visual customisation of keys. This is not vapourware, pre-orders are being take now with a cut price until April 2nd. This is just a step closer to the Optimus Keyboard. They also have a mailing list for those who want to keep up with developments of the Optimus Keyboard. Happy salivating!" This is a far cry from the full keyboard, but it's still pretty nifty. Assuming it actually does ship.

The concept is very cool, and very cute

[halivar]

But is it functional? I wonder to myself, "what will I put on those keys?" Pretty much just things that normally are an Alt-Click away anyways. I don't expect the keyboard of being able to handle serious macros, or anything.

Not vapourware?

[stevey]

"This is not vapourware, pre-orders are being take now with a cut price until April 2nd"

Sadly many projects which have never appeared have also taken pre-orderes.

So this "justification" doesn't amount to very much. I'd love to have a look at the prices, but sadly the site is down so I can't.

Re:Not vapourware?

[RESPAWN]

I don't think it's uncommon for companies to rely on the pre-order funds to finish final development of a product. Sometimes they just don't get enough though, and they never release their product.

Cool commercial applications

[binaryDigit]

I think that for personal use, this is pretty much nothing but eye-candy. However, I can see some pretty decent commercial uses (note not necessarily in it's current configuration). Keyboards that are able to adapt to the application their running in a kiosk environment (where the core qwerty keys remain fixed, but the others change as needed) for example. One BIG use would be ..... the keyboard as a display. Imagine one of these keyboards in a kiosk where it's actually displaying content as it treats the keys as a miniature multi-segmented display. It would be quite catchy and you could drive a significant bit of content through it. Picture the main interface display being the keyboard (say something simple like some type of ATM), with the standard display containing other information, or perhaps a "guide", or showing more details.

Money

[wongn]

Well, news was spreading quickly through Digg and elsewhere hours before this story was posted.

I don't know where you got that $300 figure from. If you're extrapolating it directly up, it'd be $4000; but Art Lebedev are still claiming that it will cost "Less than a decent mobile phone"; which would then give you $300. Did I just argue myself in circles? ^^
But, for people interested in getting the full keyboard, I can't see any of them forking out an extra $100 for these 3 keys; which don't have the greatest of practical applications.

$100 for three keys

[Refried Beans]

That's "Piece of History" pricing right there. It sounds like they need the cash in order to make it through to production of the full keyboard. So they took a prototype, sized it down to something they could afford to manufacture and finished the software they need to make it work. They can use this piece to test the market and work out any problems in their manufacturing process. Sounds like a really good move to me.

Keyboard Layout labels

[dada21]

I use so many different keyboards over the year and I wish the industry had a different label for each layout design. Some have large backspace keys with small enter keys, others have tiny backspace keys with mammoth enter keys. I think I've seen 3 or 4 layouts over time, which is crazy considering that typing becomes more efficient if the keys are in the same place. I figure the best way to get manufacturers to conform a little better is to name the layouts, and once you have your preference, you'll tend to buying the ones you're familiar with. That way manufacturers can see what consumers want and don't want. I'm sure there is a market for different layouts, but it frustrates me when I can't recall what keyboard I am used to without actually buying a new one and then finding out a day later that I'm used to a different sized "any" key.

Re:The concept is very cool, and very cute

[m0RpHeus]

I guess a good application would be a multi-lingual keyboard. A keyboard that would let me do standard QWERTY then at a press of a button the keyboard layout would change to Kana or Klingon or some other characters used in other language.

If I was going to buy it....

[springbox]

I wouldn't buy it to actually *press* the keys. I'd be more interested in programming the displays to show something useful. That would be pretty cool.

'5000 hours of continuous use'

[affinity]

This seems a little slim to me. I'm not up on the expected lifetime of OLED tech but I hope it has a nifty sleep function. Because 5000 is just over 200 days of contiuous use. How many of us keep our computers running all the time....

Re:5000 hours?

[JPRelph]

That's 200 days if the keyboard is on 24 hours a day, chances are that you'd be looking at closer to 8 hours a day on average for even pretty heavy users. At that kind of rate you'd be looking at over 600 days and the chances are that 8 hours a day averaged over a year is still a bit high compared to most people.

I love the smell of...

[squoozer]

fresh vapourware in the morning. Come on - this is a scam. If it isn't a scam than at a minimum it won't be as good as the pictures they are currently showing. The display will fail within a year, the keys will be heavy and nasty and the API will suck.

OLED technology just isn't good enough for this to be viable yet. Maybe, if you were NASA, you could get this keyboard to work but then howmany of us have unlimited piles of cash? To anyone that does happen to have piles of cash to burn please send some my way - thanks.

Sod the colour screens

[hattig]

Make a version with a long-life OLED colour (not 5000 hours because of the blue) monochrome display.

Looking at my keyboard, woo, look, black on white. No reds, purples, greens ... well, that might be mouldy cake between the keys.

I'm sure that monochrome would be cheaper for a start, require less bandwidth to update, and for keyboard uses, just as useful.

Currently it is three pressable displays.

Stick a 64x64 monochrome/greyscale OLED into a key-sized key, and make a keyboard from that. Leave the full colour version until the technology is better - both on the OLED side and on the keyboards with display side.

Looks like someone's 59 days early.

[Theovon]

Hey, guys, April fools is in two months!

In all seriousness, I'm curious what anyone would do with a keyboard that has only three keys on it. And who would buy it for $100?

It might be useful for embedded applications, like some mall kiosk where you push buttons to get through a menu. But it's still a bit pricy and short on keys.

Re:Not vapourware?

[masklinn]

That's very simple: because when they unveiled the Optimus design as an art concept a year ago the response was overwhelming, geeks everywhere got mad and started frothing at the very idea of owning that think and being able to type on it.

They started doing hardware design because people were damn interrested in owning a physical version of their conceptual design, and they thought "well, if it can work why not doing it?".

They're more than likely doing it in partnership with a HW maker too (I think they said it'd be the path they'd take when they said that they had started working on a "real" implementation of the optimus), not on their own.

Menu-driven interfaces.

[Vo0k]

For those who bitch 3 keys are useless: These are 3 choices at a time, not 3 fixed choices all the time. You can create any menu-based user interface using it. Most have 4 keys ("up", "down", "OK/Enter", "Cancel/Leave" (usually found in cell phones). Still it can be done with 3 keys, if you give up "Cancel" and replace it with a menu position - My beeper had an interface like that, worked fine - or leave out "Up" and just cycle through the whole list with "Down" every time.

Re:The concept is very cool, and very cute

[AKAImBatman]

Except of course there will never be sufficient market penetration for anyone to actually bother putting support for this in their programs.

Getting operating system support (probably through drivers or plugins) is a sufficiently "killer" feature to promote these. Just imagine what can be done without individual program support:

*) Changing language layouts remaps the glyphs on the keyboard
*) Holding down a modifier key (shift, caps lock, alt, Windows, etc.) changes all the glyphs to show what you'll actually be typing, or the command you'll be giving to the GUI.
*) Images for "quick launch" buttons change as they are remapped to other functions. (A good replacement for the Windows Quick Launch bar that disappeared in the new XP look?)

Those are some great features just to start out with. Get a popular game or two to add support, and these things will be flying off the shelves like hotcakes.