Slashdot Mirror
Optimus OLED Keyboard Pre-Orders Start Dec. 12
Jupix writes, "After almost a year and a half of public development, the Optimus OLED keyboard is nearing completion. According to the project blog, pre-orders for the Optimus-103 will start on December 12. The price is unspecified at this time, but Art Lebedev has said the keyboard will cost 'less than a good mobile phone' (probably about $400). Don't expect to see those 10 programmable function keys on the left on this first version, though, as they will not make their debut until the Optimus-113, released later."
Does anyone know what kind of switches it uses?
At that price I'd expect buckling spring switches (like the old IBM Model M) or mechanical Alps switches (like the old Apple Extended Keyboard II). Although I think only Unicomp makes buckling spring keyboards anymore.
I'd be disappointed if keys that look so nice, just have a squishy feel to them like a cheap rubber-dome membrane Dell keyboard.
Looks like the keyboard is force on an angle. Normally you're able to adjust the height of the keyboard. I generally like my keyboard as flat as possible and my desk/chair set to the right height so my wrists are in a comfortable and flat position instead of being tilted up. Too bad, looks like the keyboard has promise.
I have no signature
Overall changes are one thing (ala Quake), but what I want is to have the display change when I press the CTRL or ALT key.
So that CTRL changes the C key display to COPY and so on. Including the function and specialty keys (arrows, PrtSc).
And an editor that allows me to customize what the keys show, so when I am programming I can set up the display to match my key mapping preferences. With smart focus management to whatever program is in the foreground.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Where do I start queueing?! Let's hope it works with my PS3! /sarcasm
Anyone miss the days when things just "went on sale"?
Is this the thread where we say what we wish we had in a keyboard?
I really like the keyboard on my MacBook, I wish I could find one like it for my PC's
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
-b.
This is the sort of thing that many users would love to get when the pricepoint is right. Both for easy of use (wouldn't you love a keyboard that could change languages at a single click?) and for increased productivity (that photoshop overlay looked pretty slick).
:-)
$400 is over my budget. When it hits $100 it's mine.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Thats basically the only thing that had us excited in the first place! The first release will be lame without it..
After looking at the site, the Optimus mini three (three keys) runs for $160USD. I do not see how they can sell 103 keys for $400, when they are selling 3 for $160. I know that the price will get cheaper for the keyboard (still has only one usb controller), but at the 3 for $160 rate, the keyboard with 103 keys would run ~$5493USD. I seriously doubt it will be cheaper than a nice cell phone.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
I don't know about your credit card, but when I charge something, they require something a bit more concrete than "less than the price of a good cell phone".
I like the look, I like the idea... I've waited a long to see these be available... but, around $400???
At that kind of expense, it better have a 100G drive, about 512M memory, and run Linux. (and for an extra $100 - $200, Windows XP...)
I know it's new, I know price points start high, I'll wait.
Read the blog for details. They scrapped the OLED idea in favor of LCD screens to save cost.
Does it have drivers for linux?
No, really
I was kind of hoping for a completely flat, touch sensitive keyboard (think LCARS) so you could completely redesign the key layouts, or even use as a tablet etc...
Would be great for games as well. Maybe ver 2.0
do you really look at your keyboard?: doing always the same thing, you already know where the keys are ( i hope you know the quake keys if you're playing quake :/). Do you need a flashing 'COPY' when hitting ctrl + c ?
But of course, it's pretty cool to have a keyboard like that.. I wouldn't mind..
Adding new menu items to McDonald's cash register will never be easier!
huh? The squishy feeling is a good thing(tm) Its called a quiet keyboard. I very much dislike the spring keyboards, esp if yo use them for data entry. With quiet keyboards its much easier to press the keys.
Although ultimately it comes down to personal preference, I think that the 'clicky' buckling-spring keys are actually easier to use and less fatiguing. Because there is immediate tactile and audible feedback when the key-switch is actuated, you don't have to press it as far down. When I use a 'soft touch' keyboard, I find that I hit the keys further and harder, because there's not that feedback; I slam each key all the way down instead of (with practice) only pushing each key down as far as is necessary.
The noise of the original IBM Model M's is definitely a downside; if you have to work around other people, I can see how it wouldn't win you many friends. In my opinion, the Apple Extended Keyboard II with the Altus switches is the best of both worlds. It's softer both in terms of pressure and sound than the IBM, but it's not as 'mushy' as a soft-touch (silicone dome).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You're not supposed to look at the keyboard. It slows down your typing.
Learn to type on a blank keyboard.
What is the hype? Isn't it just a keyboard? OK OK, it is cool, LCDs etc. but $400+ for a keyboard? But then I am not rich.
OLEDs are cool and all, and support color...
But if they used e-paper for each key, couldn't this be used in laptops and other low-power devices?
Could help bring Dvorak more into the mainstream?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Since I need to exchange keyboard setups (from Spanish (Spain setup) to English to Japanese and others at times, I can see usefulness in this thing. Looks flashy too, although looks like it's rather expensive.
I wonder if it works in Linux, too?
Last time I needed a phone, it was either free, or it was like $50
Are you aware of what you signed up for? You probably had to use the same network provider for a year or more, at inflated prices.
I'm glad someone brought up the dvorak layout. This will make switching to dvorak and back family friendly. "One touch dvorak."
Yeah, right. I think you need to think that over before calling other people dumb.
OMG! They "destroyed it" by supporting the keyboard design the overwhelming majority of people are used to instead of supporting a layout that only two companies feel is important. Those bastards.
I can imagine this being nice to have if you're a heavy user of virtual machines. For example, I run OS X. It would be nice to have a standard OS X layout, then switch to a Windows install in Parallels and have the keyboard switch to having a Windows key. Then switch to Ubuntu and see a Gnome-like foot for the menu. Or KDE and have a big K, or...
You get the idea. Price is somewhat hefty though, especially for something that isn't going to have the side keys. I'll wait until I read reviews about how well it feels before I consider splashing out the daft quantities of cash required. Don't get the wrong idea, I wish them well. I'm just not going to be pre-ordering, that's all.
Cheers,
Ian
Have they spoken with Bloomberg about this? They already remap keys (by ordering custom keyboards in all sorts of funky colors) and it causes no end of confusion among a portion of their users who can't find the delete key any more (it's labeld CONN/DFLT (in big upper case) delete (in lower case) on their keyboard). This seems like the best of both worlds. And Bloomberg has plenty to drop a few hundred more on their systems. They've been shipping wireless keyboard/flat screen sets for at least 5 years and the latest keyboard has a print scanner.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Did anyone else notice that the model numbers are primes?
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Or he simply got himself a model which doesn't run Linux, play videos, do his laundry and make him coffee while organising his socks and rearranging Beethoven's 5th for the kazoo.
I don't know much about the situation in the U.S.A., but around here basic models can easily go for under 50 EUR retail.
With the old IBM keyboards. There seems to be this kind of reverence for them on /. and I don't understand why. I used to have one (had an IBM desktop). It was noisy and hard to press the keys. I much prefer my current MS keyboard which has easy, quiet keys. The only potential argument I've heard for the old keyboards is durability. Ok, maybe so, but what kind of stress do you subject them to that makes them break? I have, thus far, never managed to wear out a key on a keyboard. I use the hell out of my computer too, it's pretty much all I do with my time.
So what's the deal with the old IBM keyboards? Is it just some kind of geek-tough guy thing? "Back in my day our keyboards could cause hearing damage and by god we liked it!" I just don't understand what the problem with modern, soft, quiet keyboards is. They don't seem to have problems with breaking even under heavy use, so what's up?
Clearly you've never purchased a cell phone and not signed the next two years of your life away on a contract.
I can't wait to use the Optimus keyboard with a Phantom console to play Duke Nukem Forever!
Remember, folks it's less than a good mobile phone IN RUSSIA. Even subsidized phones aren't subsidized as heavily there, and most phone plans are pre-paid. And it's probably the owner of Russia's leading design studio who wrote that post. For him "a good mobile phone" could easily be $1000.
is anyone else just sick of hearing about this thing? more than a dozen of my friends have sent me links to this keyboard's site as if i'd never heard about it before. it's going to be grossly overpriced*, and only marginally useful. 99.99% of people won't get one. can we talk about something else now?
* and I spent $100 for my keyboard
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Sign your life away? Good lord what is so hard about reading the details, and getting a contract which suits you?
400$ ???!!
YUCK, no thanks..
i'll wait for the chinese-built version... i bet it will only be 25$ or so maximum.
root@127.0.0.1
The features that this keyboard provide are widely unnecessary in comparison to the cost regarding home applications. This keyboard, however, would be absolutely perfect for implications such as the recording industry. In the record business, cost is hardly an issue compared to time, And when you're working with digital audio workstations, such as Pro-Tools which has hundreds of key commands that vastly speed up any recording or mixing process compared to just using a mouse, they are often un-intuitive and hard to memorize. A keyboard like this that could intuitively transform its layout upon starting different applications to reveal program-specific commands would be incredibly helpful, and just all around l33t.
"There is no Honor, without Pie."
-Weeble
I agree that paying $400 for nothing but a basic cell phone would be dumb. However, I believe the original poster was referring to a PDA/Camera/Wi-fi/Bluetooth phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. Paying $400 for a phone like that might be extravagant, but it is definitely not dumb. Dumb would be you for not realizing that.
I wonder if they'll have some kind of sleep mode for the displays to ensure they won't burn out prematurely.
;)
One of the biggest hurdles I'd heard of for OLEDs was their lifespan, particularly for the blue emitters.
I'm not sure if they have issues with burn in, but a screensaver would be nice too. Perhaps a slideshow that spans all the keys, or Pac Man running back and forth across rows
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Some of the comments on the images published here are really funny. It's like some restaurant would decide to publish chef's thoughts on a new soup receipe, and some folks would look at the process and say, 'Gee, he pours water in! We will never dine here!'
Reaction in the comments: But this is the internet, why else would you be posting this if not to hear my windbag opinion of how you should run your enterprise?
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
... if this can support emacs. Just think of all the layouts it would have to have -- one for each prefix key in the global keymap and variants for each supported major and minor mode! And what would it do if any of those keymaps were customized?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Will it come with a cleaning kit of some sort? I dread the thought of a screwdriver being pushed underneath those OLED keys and prying them loose to get to the dirt... Oh, wait a second. It is a wireless keyboard, right? So the keys have wireless connection to the board? Cool, cleaning problem solved :)
Unfortunately not. If you check the actual keyboard layout for the Optimus 103, shown in this thread http://community.livejournal.com/optimus_project/ (6th comment down I think), you'll find that it doesn't match any commonly used layout. Not US, not European, not Russian. Everyone will find a key missing somewhere.
Following just one common layout and leaving everyone else to cope, I could understand. Putting in "too many" keys so that a number of common layouts could be essentially emulated, I could understand. Putting in too few for everyone is just stupid.
I can't find it because I dunno what username I was loggin in with at the time--but-
/.) I posted a price estimate of $5-$7 for each OLED key. I think at that time, I said I'd be surprised if they could get it out for under $500. I expected it to be further towards $700.
In one of the other stories on this (here on
OLEDs have dropped in price somewhat but not that much, and only for bulk production (which is cell-phone sized displays). I'll stay with my original estimates.
---------------
I think it has its uses, but not as a general-use, full-size keyboard. It'll be fabulously expensive, and people who use keyboards a lot don't need what it can do anyway.
Maybe as a extra special-function keypad, with 12-16-20 keys on it for special programs. For multilanguage support it would work nicely--except that very few people need that on a regular basis, and for those things that do (such as airport info kiosks) we have fairly-cheap touch screens already for this sort of thing.
~
Programmers need to type in dozens of lines of code to express a single idea sometimes
Yes, that happened to me once, when I really needed to use VBA instead of Perl...
they also have another nice project in the works... the Optimus Upravlator
they should think to introduce the Optimus Upravlator to Diebold, ES&S, Sequioa and the other voting machine manufacturers
The Optimus Upravlator seems to have ample space on each key to display a candidate's name directly on each button ( and left-right scroll arrows maybe on the bottom left and bottom right keys, if the list is longer than the available keys can display ).
Moreover, for voting machines you don't need all the electronics for five functions on a single button, one electrical contact per button might be enough, or keep all the electromechanical contacts on a button, for redundancy and button balancing, but wire them together.
This would solve the problems they have with touch screen voting machines that constantly need re-aligning the touchscreen with the display contents.
You would not end up with the machine selecting the wrong candidate, a different one than the one you tried to highlight on the screen.
root@127.0.0.1
A "good" mobile phone doesn't only cost $400. New Motorola and Nokias can easily cost $600. Some of the more advanced phones can go for $800. And if you're looking overseas where they have phones far more sophisticated than anything currently available in the US then expect prices in the range of $1000.
The definition of "good" is fairly broad. Do you mean "good" as in average or "good" as in top-of-the-line?
"...but what moron pays $400 (or more??) for a phone?"
An open-minded moron that wants a Treo.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
No, I've actually had a cell phone for about 10 years. Never paid more than $100 for it, though.
Unicomp will fix your Model M for something like 30$ I believe. Worth looking into for sure.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Don't get me wrong; that's a slick hack. But think about it... how much time do you spend looking at your keyboard. If you're over 12, the answer's not much.
After your first half hour playing quake, you know where the keys are and this thing's gimmick is superfluous.
not to mention expensive, and likely makes the thing easier-to-break.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Hey, You're using an international layout keyboard, aren't you?
zes, how did zou know?
BBH
If I needed an international keyboard, I'd just swap out the caps for the keys. I know I've seen this done some place. Maybe these guys will find a niche market at the UN and other places where many different nationalities frequently sit down at the same keys and don't want to bring their own keyboard. I hope they have planned to recoup their development costs within a small number of units sold.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
for the g15 which can do that and more just without the lcd as keys?....doesent sound like a good deal to me, drop it to the $75 like my g15 was and ill buy it, but until then, thats $325 too much for a keyboard...
-Noc
I do agree with you about the setup.
But XML? I prefer plain text files all the time.
There are APIs to read and write plain text files, if your argument is the "there are libraries!" one.
Hopefully you don't want to make the keyboard "Web 3.0" compatible.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Look people, it is going to be expensive, but not 'Oil-sheik-market' expensive. I can see a lot of use for this. The übergamer will love this, of course, and the semi-rich gadget freaks. But I can imagine that this could be useful in many places. First, it is a true keyboard, you can enter character data, it has a tactile feedback, which makes it better than a touchscreen. (Have you ever tried those?) I can see a version of this in banks, restaurants, and other places. Multimedia authors will love it, switching between Photoshopping, movie- and sound editing, and every function is just a keypress away, without memorizing them like a Shakespeare play.
Think outside the box.
Conductive ink seemed to work for me. Still using it, it's 8 years old by now.
However, ony two keys were dead and then fixed, not the entire keyboard.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Now for the keyboard they've dropped OLED, dropped the extra function keys and moved back to LCD meaning that you'll need an external power brick to power it.
Meanwhile, the Ideazon Zboard (a range of key sets that include highly customised key shapes) and the Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard (LCD display built into keyboard) have been in the market for ages. And they're affordable.
Unfortunately the 3-key mini-Optimus only supports a refresh rate of 3fps, which I suspect will be too slow for anything other than strategy type games. Of course the full size one might be quicker, but somehow I doubt it...
P.S. Anyone who wants to see what developer tools/information they already have, click here. Good news is it looks like they have a protocol description, for the mini at least.
Hello,
You created such an innovative keyboard (Optimus) but you are still using the
old-fashioned staggered columns design. While this may be enough for the
majority of people, it isn't the right choice for customers who focus on
ergonomics.
I personally use TypeMatrix [ www.typematrix.com ] and Plum [ www.plum.bz ]
keyboards that have a matrix layout, similar to the numeric keypad, and
several ergonomic features.
I would consider buying an Optimus keyboard if it had a matrix layout and
ergonomic features like centre keys for important functions such as Enter or
Backspace (a very important step towards ergonomics is balancing the use of
the left and right hands).
I hope you will research the market of matrix and ergonomic keyboards and
consider releasing a more ergonomic version of Optimus, even if its price
would be higher.
Thanks,
--
Nikolaos S. Karastathis (NSK), BSc(Hons), MBCS, MIET, MIEEE, MACS(Prov)
I think i'll stick with cheap keyboards for the moment, unless these things are coffee proof, then it might be worth the investment.
Blazing Spiders
Did you notice where they placed the Enter key? Two whole keys to the right of where it is usually placed. I guess not too many touchtypers would buy this keyboard anyhow...
Keyboard porn.
Make it a puzzle - like Concentration. You have to match up items. Each matched set of items is replaced with a section of the final image.
I suppose the final image could be anything. Doesn't have to be porn. Funny - that was the first thing that sprang to mind...
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
nice keyboard how do you clean it?
the Optimus LCD keyboard can be powered by the PS/2 port. Remember the Cuecat scanner? LCD/LEDs do not require that much power at all.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What a load of expensive dung. No decent touch typist ever looks at the keys! So what's the point?
While we're on the subject of keyboards, does anyone know where I could find a keyboard that either doesn't have the windows keys or they can be disabled or made to do something else?
System Preferences... > International > Input Menu > Keyboard Viewer
[x] Show input menu in menu bar
Nice idea, although they botched the physical layout. That 'Enter' key looks way out there! It goes [L], [;], ['], [Enter]! Duh.
While your response is interesting it isn't relevant in this branch of the discussion. We were commenting on whether or not the keys should be aligned on a grid of perfect rows & columns or in the more traditional staggered column layout. We weren't discussing where each individual key is located with respect to the keys around it.
Very few things are done to last as well as computer keyboards.
The one I am using was bought in 1995 and is still going strong.
It is one of the original MS Natural Keyboards, the last product I ever bought from them. I would recommended it but given who they are I don't do so.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Most keyboards nowadays are immensely better and there are many that are ergonomically sound. But nostalgia is an strong feeling.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.