johnbatdorf.net/blog/ - Optimus Mini

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

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So the big news from Art Lebedev Studios is the release of the Optimus Mini 'keyboard'. It's essentially a 3 key OLED keyboard that allows you to customize the three keys to be specific to the application in focus. If you're using Word, you can make the keys be "Save" "Print" or "Spell Check". Playing a game, setup the keys to be pause, save, and load.

At this point, my money will wait for the keyboard. From a "cool" perspective, it would be cool to have this on your desktop, monitoring CPU usage, memory usage, and network usage. But for a gadget that adds a lot of value to your computing experience, I don't think this thing fits the bill.

There are a ton of 'cool' uses for it, as you'll see from the site, but again, nothing you can't already do with your standard keyboard. I'm looking forward to when the full optimus keyboard goes into production and is readily available. Based on the price of the mini ($100) I'm guessing the full keyboard is going to be a lot more than previously predicted.

Check it out here:

http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus-mini/description/