FW: Optimus keyboard in the news

[Don Osborn]

FYI...

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 11:32 PM
To: a12n-collaboration at bisharat.net; unicode at unicode.org
Subject: Optimus keyboard in the news

The "Optimus Maximus" keyboard that has been in the works since mid-2005(?)
is apparently going to be a reality later this year (orders being accepted
beginning May 20; first deliveries in Nov.) for a price - over US$1500.

See:
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/
http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/27/optimus-maximus-gets-price-and-date/
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/757/uber-keyboard-costs-more-than-your
-pc

For those not following the story, the Art Lebedev Studio in Moscow has been
working on this project for a keyboard with LED keys that change to indicate
the active keyboard layout. 

Eventually the price will come down - personally I would hope enough so that
this could become standard. The potential for minority languages that use
extended Latin or non-Latin writing systems, and for computing generally
where more than one language is used, could be great. On the other hand, not
sure how easily such a keyboard could be worked into laptops/notebooks where
one would think the nature of the keys would add to weight and bulk. And of
course something like this on increasingly popular mobile devices - where
the keys are already almost too small to type with - would seem improbable.
However one can hope that the technical and production-cost issues can be
resolved to make this technology more widely available. 

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net
PanAfrican Localisation project