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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.
-LEDs are bright and clear
-Key Image Editing is quick and painless (use your graphic editor of choice)
-Still some quirks to work out with Macs
-High-quality parts and construction
-Requires extra strength for keypresses, so unsuitable for typing more than a few minutes.
Je me fous du passé
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.
... Maximus keyboards was sold for $2750 And then when Russel Crow saw it, he went and got Litigiosus Andronicus and did the same.I think I have some good ideas for some more keyboard names:
My work here is dung.
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.
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
You know the ones I mean.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
No wireless. More keyforce than an IBM Model M. Lame.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Speaking of which, the full blown 103 programmable key version is $1564, but with less programmable keys it is cheaper. As follows:
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
You must be new here. I know that that's right when the government satellites will get me, why do you think the planes fly at such a huge altitude when they don't have to?! Duh, so that its easier for the satellites to brain scan you!
But in all seriousness, I believe most of that movie (The Gladiator) was fabricated. Yes, there was a 'Maximus' (if that was his name) but the events surely did not transpire as they did in the movie. It's not like I'm making fun of "I Claudius" or actual documentaries on Rome.
My work here is dung.
Then the Destroyer will plug the Optimus into the Phantom, boot Duke Nukem Forever, and the universe will come to an end.
www.eFax.com are spammers
...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?
"And the larger the key, the more force is required, so enter is easier than space, but harder than tab. " whothehellneedsspacewhentheygota$2750oledkeyboard?
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
You're not supposed to run the Optimus through the dishwasher if it gets dirty and crusty? :) And unless you're filthy rich, you can't chuck it and buy a new one.
So you either:
Type with gloves on;
Use in a clean room;
Spend a painstaking amount of time cleaning it.
The Optimus is best at home among all those other impractical gadgets, usually found in HOUSE OF THE FUTURE! exhibits, that aren't used by real people...
Am I seeing this properly? Are the hot keys in the second column in the engadget article as follows?
Firefox, Youtube link, Lesbian porn link!?
Hey, if the tech industry keeps this kind of thing up, we might see a demo of Duke Nukem forever soon!
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
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.
Hmm. I learned to type on an old Underwood, and it was just like that. You really had to work at it to hit a key, so "pounding the keyboard" wasn't hyperbole. I think the sucker was made in the 1920's, and it was very heavy. The funny thing is, I never heard of people having carpal tunnel syndrome until the days of electric typewriters. In college, I got an Olivetti electric with an adjustable-action keyboard. When it's set on the light touch setting, it's more sensitive than any computer keyboard I've come across yet. I guess Olivetti went from one extreme to the other.
<sigh> Those were the good ol' days.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
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