Ion add-on to equip iPhone with full Qwerty keyboard Ion, a company best known for its USB turntables and cassette decks, has introduced a Qwerty keyboard add on for... the iPhone. Ion iType Ion's iType: fast text entry on the iPhone No mere clip-on BlackBerry-style mini keypad, the iType is a near full-size board with a space in which to sit the handset in landscape mode. …
I'm not quite sure who will buy the keyboard (not very portable), but at least functional accessories are starting to appear.
I'd rather see a compact fold-up keyboard, or even better an adapter that allows any USB keyboard to be plugged into the iPhone.
The piano keyboard actually makes more sense, although again, being able to plug any electric piano into the iPhone would be even better.
surely the whole point of wanting an external keyboard is to enable text entry without the virtual keyboard taking up so much screen space. but without being able to override the iPhone's keyboard popping up, all this does is remove the portability of the iPhone - if you need a fullsize keyboard that much, get a laptop!!
...the fancy rotate it around to get landscape view only works in a few applications. If the application you use only supports portrait mode, you will be typing with not only 1/3 the screen obscured by the on-screen keyboard, but also with everything on it's side.
Seriously, if you need a qwerty keyboard on your phone (I do), then get a phone with one built-it, or jailbreak your iPhone / iPod Touch so you can install a proper bluetooth stack that supports BT keyboards...
If Apple wanted to, they could alloy you to pair an Apple bluetooth keyboard with your iPhone. And of course the phone would know about the pairing and not show the keyboard. Simples.
Are you listening, Steve? Hell, why not just implement full Bluetooth connectivity. Go wild, live a little.
If this had been available 18 months ago, I'd certainly have bought it. However, I've belatedly been forced to recognize that "mobile computing" is never going to be frictionless enough to be worthwhile. Most things can wait till I get back to my desk.
As for the fold-up keyboards mentioned by Ian Ferguson, they just don't appeal to me. I've used them with various Palms and the Nokia N800. They're not solid enough to allow you to forget about the keyboard and just type, so what's the point?
I dunno - I had a folding keyboard for my ickle Palm m105 back in the day (when there was no way I could afford the cost or bulk of a laptop alongside my existing desktop PC and a bag chock already full of physical folders). It was just fine, folded up into an integrated carry case about the same size as the PDA, but when unfolded it braced together with clips (and the case exterior) to a solid, if slightly thin "proper" board. Reminiscent of a largish, slightly cut-price version of a typical netbook keyboard in fact. Much better than the tiny, mushy membrane or tacky chiclet jobs that made up most of its competitors.
The real problem was the PDA itself, and more specifically its software. Who would know that you could make a 16mhz M68k so unresponsive, particularly when only dealing with a 160x200, 4 greyscale display? (I cut my wordprocessing teeth on an Atari ST, for comparison) That a reflective LCD could be so hard to read in a well lit lecture theatre? Or it could be so hard to transfer plaintext in a consistently usable format from a portable device to a desktop?
Dropped the whole thing for an early 90s mono subnotebook (running on Win3.1 and 6 Tandy nicads cack-handedly soldered together) swapped for a CDR of Counterstrike and a box of washing powder (ah, studentville) in the end. Far more usable, if a bit clunky for storing addresses and alarms in.
I think there might be a lesson in that... just get one of the smaller flavours of netbook if you're that desperate for typing on the go. Or an old Amstrad NC100 (or actual Z88? Runs for a fortnight on a set of AA's allegedly because it only runs the CPU in response to a keypress). Or a windows/symbian/android/etc phone and a mini-size bluetooth board. Like... Oh, I dunno... the wireless, iSlate sized, super-thin milled aluminium jobs that come with the current iMacs? Just a thought.
Musicians have been waiting for this since the laptop, since memory and progammability of electronic instruments is such poor value. In the meantime, software replaces several classes of hardware - sequencers and samplers, for instance - but a 'home studio' still consists several expensive boxes connected by almost as expensive cables (USB, audio or MIDI).
That said, 25 keys won't satisfy pianists and 88 keys with piano-feel would fail as a portable. Screen size of an i-touch is adequate, but does it run Logic fast enough?
Need an icon for "We're still looking", fail is too harsh.
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