What you didn't find under your tree this year: Art.Lebedev Optimus Keyboard
A long and weighty present sits under the tree this Christmas, you edge to it when no one’s looking; they’re all distracted by the Doctor Who special anyway. The gift wrap cover depicts elves and goblins, “not very festive,” you think to yourself, “but I’ll let it slide.” The name tag dangles seductively before you eyes, you read it… it’s yours! You tear away the paper and inside you find one of these: An Art.Lebedev Optimus Keyboard, just what you always wanted!
Of course, such things are fantasy. For one, we all know that you would be glued to the screen along with everyone else and, secondly, the Optimus keyboard won’t be seen by you or I until Spring ’07 now, despite the fact that they’ve been teasing us with it for some time. Shame.
The Optimus Keyboard, in case you haven’t heard of it before now, is a brand new keyboard where every key is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at any given moment. Basically, the keys are tiny little screens and can be customised for all kinds of layouts ranging from new languages and alphabets to Photoshop and Quake setups.
The full keyboard is now in production and is expected to ship later in 2007 but if you can’t wait until then there’s always the Art.Lebedev Optimus Mini Three to tide you over. This variant is a small three button version which is customisable to work as three programmable buttons or simply to display information.
By far the coolest feature though (I couldn’t not mention this) on the full Optimus is the fact that when using the standard alphabet layout if you hit the “Caps Lock” button all the letters change from lowercase to uppercase on the displays and vice versa. That would’ve kept me amused for hours this Christmas, I want one so bad.
Read more over at the Art.Lebedev website.
What else you didn’t find under your tree this Christmas:
2 comments
Yeah I agree that the photo is a blatant Photoshop job but I’ll forgive that since it came from the “concept” section of the Art.Lebedev site. Who knows if it’ll appear in the ’07 for sure but a boy can dream, can’t he?
Haha, this is just blatant vapourware! When I first saw the supposed photos of it I could tell it was just renders, it’s so obvious!
Now they released a 3 key version with screens only filling half the keys for £135!!!!
I suspect the full one will have similar mini screens (nothing like the origianl render) and cost something like £500 if it every appears, which certainly won’t be in 2007. The whole thing is probably just another investment scam like the Moller Sky Car and the Phantom console.
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