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Optimus Keyboard Starts Shipping
Tom's Hardware is reporting that the Optimus keyboard that everyone was so anxious for (although maybe less so when they saw the price tag) started shipping this week. "According to an announcement made on the Optimus project blog, keyboards are now shipping to customers who pre-ordered the $1564 keyboard nine months ago. Keyboards with passive keys are delayed and will be shipping in about a month, the manufacturer said. [...] Earlier this month, one of the first Optimus Maximus keyboards was sold for $2750 on Ebay." Engadget even got the chance to test one of these expensive toys out.
according to Engadget, not only is it wildly expensive, but it's painful to type on. I wish form followed function a little more often in the gadget world.
The DC supply plugs into the back of the keyboard, ugly for such a otherwise expensive and well designed keyboard.
Why couldn't they have a split end on the keyboard cable with the DC input and USB connections, that way you would have no DC cable in sight.
Don't a lot of old-timers say that the keyboards of old, where you actually got some resistence from the keys, were more comfortable to type with than the yielding keyboards of today?
In any event, it's interesting to see that advances are still being made in keyboard technologies. The input model of, say, the film minority Minority Report , where you have to wave your arms around would in reality prove highly exhausting. Voice input isn't anywhere near ready, especially for people like me who are entering a different language in each window on the screen. And unless Kurzweil is right after all, I'm sure we're still a long ways off from direct neural input.
So, the keyboard is painfully inadequate at doing the one thing keyboards are suppodes to be doing: data input. Kinda like a solid gold mouse that won't track, or a 80-inch monitor that won't display better than 800x600. Pretty pointless.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
This thing is the dumbest thing ever. Even more useless than the display on the G15 gaming keyboard. Who fricking watches the keys while typing or gaming?! And according to the review typing sucks on this keyboard. WTF? A keyboard that does not allow you to type properly has no reason to exist. And what looney pays $2750 for it?
Made by idiots, for idiots.
Flame on!
You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
Since these things appear to be mostly geared toward Windows users (yes, I know, some Mac too) it's only a matter of time before somebody releases as script-kiddy utility for pwning your friends' and enemies' keyboard OLEDs.
I can see it now. Grandma is surfing for recipes and all of a sudden her nice new keyboards starts showing all sorts of inappropriate text and images.
And plus apparently it sucks as a keyboard.
-WtC
*** $!g +yP3d 0n 0p+!^^u$ k3Yb0@Rd ***
Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
Unfortunately, the G-15 does exactly what the Optimus will be doing 99.9% of the time, for $1450 less.
Also there's the Catch-22 that no geek actually looks at the keyboard whilst typing, so the demographic most likely to think it's cool is also the least likely to need it.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
...since the price has apparently dropped from $1500+ to "only" $462, according to Lebedev's website. And as a $600 iPhone owner, I thought Apple was bad. I suppose at that price I could almost give it serious consideration, but I think I'll wait it out for v2.0.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Actually, I can think of at least a couple of applications for a keyboard like this where additional key resistance wouldn't be a big deal:
/. . And, graphical keys could be a real plus - Especially if you regularly switch back and forth between several games
* A public terminal at the U.N. or other international agency. You wouldn't expect (or encourage) long use-times at public terminals and venues like the U.N. could really make use of a keyboard that can change character sets quickly and easily.
* Gaming. Now, most of my gaming experience is with FPSs and real-time strategy, but the keyboard use (although important) was much slower than coding, e-mailing, or posting to
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
For someone with a musical background, who may have the subtlety of touch required, that would be fine. I personally prefer something a bit less responsive, as I have a tendency to slide my fingers across the keyboard which leads to a lot of typos on more responsive keyboards.
If I'm doing a lot of typing I prefer a heavier keyboard; I find accuracy and action of the keyboard more than compensate for the increased "work" of typing.
That being said, I can't imagine paying for a keyboard with the LED picture keys. That makes no sense at all to me. To get any kind of speed out of typing, you have to NOT look at the keys, not be forever distracted by the "Ooooooo shiny!" keys.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If you have to look at the keys to figure out which finger to press down, you're typing way, way, way too slowly to be getting serious work done. You might as well use a mouse and an on-screen keyboard, I'd think.
$1564 keyboard
-Still some quirks to work out with Macs
-Requires extra strength for keypresses, so unsuitable for typing more than a few minutes.
Erm, uh, the summary gives no indication whatever why this sucker costs more than a new computer. Is the damned thing made of gold and diamond studded?
Some people have too many dollars and no sense.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
My computer is less than a year old. My keyboard is 15 years old. It's so old I have an AT->PS2->USB adapter just to get it to work with my present computer.
You have to be careful when talking about resistance. Old skool keyboards are considered good because there is a significant difference in force from before the key has activated to after it has been activated. So if you just nudge a key, it has some firm resistance, then when it clicks, it has almost no resistance at all (at least until you hit bottom). But since the portion of the key press where resistance is firm is so short, it still doesn't take much effort to press keys, and it's also very easy to tell by touch whether or not you were successful in a key activation.
The problem with most modern keyboards is they're light, AND they're light for the whole press - so it's very easy to accidentally press a key to the point that it moves, and then very hard to tell whether it moved far enough that you got a keypress you didn't want. Now, if instead of a modern LIGHT keyboard you just have a modern HEAVY keyboard (more resistance), it may be harder to accidentally press a key, but you still don't have good tactile feedback as to whether you've actually pressed a key or not (you've traded not knowing if you accidentally pressed a key for not knowing if you successfully pressed one) and have just made your fingers work harder.
The trick is a short, firm press to activation, then a click to long light press after that.
paintball
No, this is for people doing video editing or music production or other multimedia editing, where you might easily have a couple of hundred functions tucked away behind various Ctrl-Shift-Alt key combinations, and which change depending on which edit screen you're in, or which function key you just pressed. If you're in an audio editor, and you mark out a section of audio, there might easily be forty or fifty different functions that you might want to apply to that block: cut/copy/paste/save-as-file/silence/optimise/filter/replace/retune/add-to-library ... the list goes on and on (when I was prototyping an all-out audio editor once, I think I had about sixty different region-edit functions).
If you're using one of these programs, the main function of the keyboard isn't inputting text, it's launching functions and actions by key-command shortcut so that the user doesn't have to dig through menus and dialog boxes. And of course, the big problem is that although a keyboard has enough buttons to launch all these functions, they aren't written on the keys, and even if you buy a custom keyboard for something like Logic (with the commands printed on the key-caps), you don't have context-sensitivity or proper customisability, and if the company adds or changes key-commands on a new software update, you're left behind. If you use a couple of different audio editing apps and a couple of video editors, plus a few other bits of specialist software, plus photoshop, and you can't face the idea of ordering seven different custom keyboards and finding some way to switch between them, then this is probably a very nice gadget for a cramped pre-production studio.
Keep a cheap generic keyboard tucked away under the desk for those times that you need to do some serious typing.
Eric Baird