Hasta La Gadget!

I’ve been enamored with the Das Keyboard since it launched in 2005. These supremely clicky, IBM-style keyboards are some of the most rugged mechanical input devices you can buy. Their Pro model — an all-black monolith with black keys and no key markings — is the gold standard for Gibson-esque console jockeys who believe that the best keyboard can be used as a weapon and shouldn’t be touched by mere mortals.

The company just launched a new “quiet” version of its Das Keyboard, Model S Professional Quiet, and I thought it would be fun to talk with Daniel Guermeur, founder of the company who went from being an open-source software maven at the turn of the century to making one of the most sought-after and coolest keyboards on the market. While Guermeur still works in software, his clicky Das Keyboard is probably his most lasting legacy in the gaming and programming world, a unique tool suited to unique professionals.

John Biggs: We’ve been talking about Das Keyboard for years, but I don’t think anybody’s really talked about how you started the company, what the inspiration was?

Daniel Guermeur: The company started in the year 2000 as a software company. At that point, we started with open source software. We actually commercialized or distributed one of the first point and click content management systems.

Within 30 days of that software being released, it was No. 1. It was the most downloaded server software on SourceForge. We had been selling there, so our model was to provide tech support for that open source software.

We did pretty well until the end of the dot-com boom, and at that point, every, most software companies had trouble finding customers, so we had to downscale a little bit. But we still kept going with that. We were pure software at that point.

Me being a software person, I spend my time on the computer, like 8 or 10 hours a day every day and the weekends and so on. Even more than 10 hours, I guess. One day I realized that I’m a pretty slow typist and if I typed faster, I would actually achieve more. I kind of tried to understand why I was slow and it was because I was looking at the keys.

So I thought, hey, if I could not look at the keys, my mind will know where the keys are. It will memorize where the keys are. So I asked my assistant to find me a keyboard with nothing on it, no key inscriptions and she came back, saying, “Hey, it doesn’t exist. I could not find one.”

So I told her, “Hey, could you contact somebody, could you find a factory in China and have them make one just for me?” And she did. And so three months later, I received a blank keyboard, totally black and totally blank and I typed on it.

And amazingly enough, I doubled my speed within 30 days.

JB: Wow.

DG: So I was pretty happy because I was very slow. I was around 30 words a minute, now I’m at 65, something like that. And I kept it on my desk and the amazing part is that people who came to my office, friends and colleagues say, “Hey, wow, you have a blank keyboard. You must be really good.” I said, “Yes, that’s me, I’m really good.”

So there was this cool factor I didn’t know about before people told me, that it really looked bad ass. And so I kept going, using my keyboard and after about a year, I had so many requests from people asking me, “Hey, where did you buy that keyboard? We want to buy one because it’s so cool.”

I said, “Hey, let me do a little study and you’ll be able to buy it from my website within one month.”

I went to see my friend, Maurice Miller, who’s one of the founders of Rackspace and I told him, “Hey, I want to ask your sysadmins to test my keyboard to see if they would buy it because a blank keyboard is something that nobody wants to buy except crazy people like me.”

My assumption was that people who are in the tech world, like sysadmins and programmers, they would like that because they were more or less like me. They said that they really liked the keyboard. About 60 percent said they would buy it, so I thought, “Hey, it’s a marketing result.” It was an informal marketing survey, nothing scientific. I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty impressive — 60 percent — it’s incredible. I’ve got to try that, to set it up online.”

What I did is I created a one-page website over the weekend. I took a picture of my keyboard. I think it was on Monday we made the website public. It was linked to a stock Yahoo store, totally ugly. The whole website, the concept was that the blank keyboard is only for the geeks — for the ubergeeks. That was the angle.

We sent one email to Gizmodo — a five-line email — saying, “Hey, Gizmodo. We’ve got a kick-ass, a bad-ass blank keyboard called Das Keyboard,” and we sent them the link. That’s all the marketing we did. I thought, they probably won’t publish that, ever, but my idea was that if I sell 15 keyboards, then maybe there was a market. Then if I have totally misjudged the opportunity I’ll sell probably five, so between five and 15.

Actually, Gizmodo published a little blog post, and within five days we had millions of visitors. The keyboard was featured in the New York Times. In the print edition we had a picture of the keyboard. It was on Slashdot, CBS News, we got MTV, World News Report, we got a ton of people talking about the keyboard.

We got millions of visitors. The web server was so busy we had to upgrade the machine. It kept crashing. We got thousands of orders within a few days.

JB: I just realized that was my post on Gizmodo. I’m looking at it now.

DG: Hey!

JB: I wrote that. I just checked. I wrote that in 2005.

DG: Thank you so much. Wow. That’s awesome.

JB: Yeah.

DG: Yeah, so I’m talking to you.

JB: Yeah, I’m the guy who made your company work.

DG: I think you are, yes. Yeah, that’s really awesome. Hopefully at some point we can meet in person so I can shake your hand.

JB: That would be nice. Anyway, keep going.

DG: We had a huge demand, and we didn’t plan for that so we didn’t have any inventory. We identified a few possible suppliers, but we didn’t talk to them. We said, “Hey, what do we do? We are a software company. We know nothing about hardware, and we have customers.”

We said, “We should try to deliver within three months.”

We contacted the customers and said, “Hey, we are out of stock. Are you willing to wait three months, and then we’ll ship?”

The vast majority said, “Yes, we are totally wanting to wait three months because that keyboard is so bad-ass. The blank keyboard, we want it.”

We said, “OK.” Then we worked really hard to procure all the keyboards and deliver them. That’s how it started.

At that point we decided, “Let’s upgrade the quality of the keyboard,” so we have been starting to improve the design, improve the technology, always focusing on the highest possible quality of every component we use.

Then we actually were able to carve a niche with positioning, which is Das Keyboard is the ultimate typing machine, where everything we design, the spirit of it, is to have the best, highest quality possible. The best typing experience possible.

That was our idea.

We think people spend at least eight hours a day typing on a keyboard, which makes a keyboard very important. That’s the object many people touch the most in their entire life. It’s a keyboard. That’s why we think, if you have a very responsive keyboard, very comfortable, your whole life gets upgraded. I don’t know what kind of keyboard you use, but I can tell you our customers really love it. When we have a new opening here on Metadot, they come and they start typing on it. They just love it.

We started with the blank keyboard. That is the one I have on my desk. Then we said, “Hey, there is a lot of demand for a high-quality, very tactile keyboard, but with inscriptions,” so then we decided to do it as well. We call it the Professional. The blank one is the Ultimate. The other one is called the Professional.

We went through several generations of products. The latest one is generation No. 3. It’s the latest, and we have several flavors.

Two models — which is Ultimate, blank one, and the Professional — and within those we have options, like the typing experience. One is the blue key switch, which is the most clicky. We have the brown key switch, which we call Soft Tactile, so it’s less clicky but still very tactile. Less clicky means also it’s not as audible as the blue key switch.

Today, we launched what we call the Quiet Keyboard. It’s a quiet key design. It’s a red key switch with a quiet key design, which makes it very quiet. The tactile feel is absolutely unbelievable. Maybe we should send you one like this so you can…

That’s the demand we have now. It’s a little bit like the tomato sauce. You have tomato sauce with the gigantic piece of meat, and some people like that, and some people prefer when the meatballs are smaller, or a lot smaller. There is like a flavor of experience that people want to have. What’s amazing is that, on paper, the specifications are very similar, but the user experience is so different.

JB: Where did you get the name? What’s the inspiration of the name? Is it just because it sounds cool?

DG: It’s a combination of things. First of all, the switch technology is German. I’m French, and my partner is German, so we looked at a good name; we looked at a blank keyboard, and so on.

A good name that actually meant something for many people was the word “das,” which is German for “the,” and “Keyboard” is really honest, so it will be “The Keyboard,” but with some German elements to it, which is about high quality, high performance, and good reliability, like the German concept of technology. That’s the idea behind it.

JB: What’s the future of the keyboard? Do you think you guys are going to be making keyboards in five years? Do you think keyboards are going to stick around?

DG: The answer is yes. In the ’80s, already I heard that the keyboard is dead — people are going to use voice recognition within a few years. I thought, “Wow, that sounds cool. I want to use that.” But the reality is that when people do serious typing they use a workstation, and they have a big screen. They have an awesome mouse, and they need to have an awesome keyboard.

If you check on Google Trends, the search trends of “mechanical keyboards” — just those two words — you will see that the demand has been exponentially increasing in the last years. There is a huge demand, and I think the demand is going to increase, even though people buy less desktops.

I think people who are still doing that are buying better-quality components that they use for a longer time. Hence, I think Das Keyboard is the key to doing that.

We have lots of things in the making. A lot. If you look at the competition, typically they do, “Hey, we have a keyboard. Now we are going to do a mouse, and maybe some different keyboards, more keyboards, so 20 keyboards or 50 keyboards.”

We are not going to do that. We have a different strategy. It’s a strategy that nobody has done yet. I cannot tell you all of it now, but the idea is that we’re going to focus on a very limited number of keyboards and we are going to increase the kind of products we sell, different kinds of products.

The concept that we are trying to address is that people want to be more productive when they work and we are going to give them tools so they are more productive in general.

JB: I saw the reusable earplugs on the site. That’s funny because it’s so true. This is the loudest keyboard ever. Who is the strangest or most interesting person that you’ve met who has been using Das Keyboard? Anybody famous or amazing that you know?

DG: I know that Noam Chomsky has one.

JB: I’m not sure that’s a good thing for some people.

Meet the Lumia 925, the latest smartphone flagship in Nokia’s increasingly populous Windows Phone portfolio. The 925 is clearly Nokia’s answer to criticisms of its high end devices being too heavy.  At the device’s London launch earlier today, Vodafone’s Patrick Chomet – brought onstage to talk up the new Lumia which the carrier will be ranging in Europe — couldn’t avoid commenting negatively on the Lumia 920’s weight. For all the noise about the 925’s camera, its less hefty hardware is the key design difference here.

The 925 drops a full 46g compared to the earlier Lumia 920, weighing in at 139g vs the 920’s hefty 185g. The phone feels pleasingly light in the hand, helped by its slender profile: it’s just 8.5mm thick at its thickest point (vs 10.7mm for the 920). In order to achieve a sleeker, lighter device, yet keep the 4.5-inch display, Nokia has dropped built-in wireless charging – but it’s not ditching the tech entirely. It has included wireless charging as an add-on via clip-on shells – likely sold separately — which increase the thickness of the 925 by a few millimetres but don’t appear to add too much weight back on.

It’s a compromise but one that results in a sleeker, more attractive handset out of the box. If it’s a choice between wireless charging – which remains something of a gimmick — or a lightweight phone, most people would opt for the latter. And that’s a calculation Nokia has clearly made with the 925.

The handset design also takes a few steps in a new direction for the Lumia range, with aluminium edging running around its four sides – a band which doubles as the phone’s antenna – coupled with a polycarbonate back. The two-tone look and feel is a definite departure for Nokia’s high end phone design. Colour options are also more subtle, with the black version having anodized, almost charcoal looking aluminium edging, while the white 925 has silver edges. There’s also a grey colourway. The trademark bright Lumia colours are reserved for the wireless charging shells — including red, yellow and cyan.

The PureView-branded 8.7MP camera on the 925 is the other big focus here. The hardware introduces a sixth lens to the device, which Nokia says improves performance in bright sunlight. This is in addition to strong low-light capabilities, which it has touted on its other Lumia flagships – including most recently the Lumia 928.

During the 925 launch Nokia demoed both the low and bright-light photography capabilities of the phone, inviting the press to compare the shots with photos taken on their own smartphones. The Lumia 925 came off as better at snapping in the dark than iPhones, the BlackBerry Z10, the HTC One and even the Lumia 920, pulling a brighter, more colourful image from out of the gloom. It also appeared to capture more detail in strong light conditions in Nokia’s test conditions.

As well as the extra hardware lens, the 925 includes a new suite of camera-editing software called Nokia Smart Camera. This makes use of a burst mode that takes 10 photos at around 5MP each. It then offers a series of image-manipulation options to enhance the photo. Some of these features were a little hit and miss under the press launch lighting conditions. Others looked a little gimmicky, such as the ability to composite a series of movements into one shot. But others seemed like they could be genuinely useful, such as a feature that allows you to create the best shot by choosing from various facial expressions — much like the timeshift feature on the BlackBerry Z10/Q10. Or another that lets you remove a moving object from an image, such as a person or car passing in front of the scene you’re trying to shoot.

The Smart Camera software won’t be exclusive to the Lumia 925 for long – Nokia said it will be pushed out to other Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices as an update in Q3. But for the moment, the Lumia 925 has the lion’s share of Nokia’s camera creativity, including some new features in its Creative Studio image editing app, such as a tilt shift and radial focus. And the Oggl app.

One more new software addition in the 925′s screen settings allows users to tweak the colour saturation and temperature of the AMOLED screen to dial down how poppingly bright the colours are and opt for more muted, photo-realistic tones if you desire. Elsewhere, this is a business-as-usual Windows Phone 8 device loaded with the usual suite of Microsoft and Nokia apps, which include its HERE mapping and location apps and Nokia Music. It is also skinned with the new more flexible Windows Phone homescreen that allows for three different-sized live tiles.

The 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon chip powering the Lumia 925 doesn’t sound that beefy, considering the proliferation of quad-core phones in the Android ecosystem at least, but it’s as top-of-the range as Windows Phone gets right now. And Nokia argues that no more processing clout is required to do all of the image processing going on under the 925′s hood.

Remember NVIDIA’s kooky Project SHIELD tablet? The one it unveiled to an unsuspecting public at back CES? Well, it’s officially not just a “project” anymore — it’s a full-fledged product, and NVIDIA is aiming to get the SHIELD out the door this June complete with a $349 price tag.

To help manage demand for the curious gaming portable, NVIDIA is also preparing to take pre-orders. If you’ve been eagerly devouring what Shield details you could and have subscribed to the Shield newsletter, you’ll be able to lock down your unit starting today — the rest will have to wait until next Monday to get their pre-orders in.

To help manage demand for the curious gaming portable, NVIDIA is also preparing to take pre-orders. If you’ve been eagerly devouring what Shield details you could and have subscribed to the Shield newsletter, you’ll be able to lock down your unit starting today — the rest will have to wait until next Monday to get their pre-orders in.

In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on what the Shield has to offer, here’s a quick rundown on what to expect. The thing runs Android Jelly Bean MR1, and manages to cram NVIDIA’s speedy new Tegra 4 chipset, 2GB of RAM, a 5-inch multi-touch display running at 720p, 16GB of internal storage, and a microSD storage slot into a controller body that’s awfully reminiscent of the venerable Xbox 360 controller. Throw in the ability to stream certain PC games from a computer and you’ve got yourself a neat little gizmo.

The Shield is an ambitious little gadget, and the ability for players to stream PC games to the thing is sure to win it some fans, but is this thing really going to sell? Let’s just consider the price tag for a moment: selling the Shield at $349 means it’s more expensive than buying an XBox 360 or a PlayStation 3. Granted, those consoles will soon be superseded by a new batch of hardware from Microsoft and Sony, but I suspect people would still rather get one of those more traditional consoles than an ambitious niche device like the Shield.

That’s to say nothing of the fact that the Shield is a device meant for on-the-go gaming. These past few months have seen both Nintendo and Sony slash the prices of their respective handheld gaming consoles in an effort to life sales, maneuvers that seem to have succeeded for now. The market may not be ready for a $349 handheld, but that hasn’t stopped NVIDIA from trying — now we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Google’s big annual developer conference kicks off on Wednesday, and while Android lead Sundar Pichai has downplayed big new announcements at Google I/O this year, we’ve also seen reports that suggest the Nexus line of Google-branded hardware won’t go completely untouched.

Nexus Phones

The rumors suggest that we won’t see a brand new Nexus phone at Google I/O this year, but what we could see instead is a mid-cycle upgrade for the Nexus 4. In fact, the existing version seems tailor-made for a couple quick internal hardware upgrades to inject some fresh life into sales and activate some new buzz around the product, which by most accounts has been selling fairly well, especially when compared to previous Nexus flagship phones.

What we’ve heard indicates that the Google Nexus 4 will appear at I/O boasting a 32GB internal memory upgrade, along with built-in LTE support. There’s an LTE-capable wireless radio built into the current Nexus 4, but it lacks a proper signal amplifier and as such remains officially disabled. Nearer the Nexus 4′s launch, you could activate it with a backdoor hack, but Google quickly shut that down.

Both these spec bumps would be easy enough to accomplish, and are both considered the most noteworthy obvious flaws on an otherwise very impressive device. And a new spy shot making the rounds today backs up earlier claims we might see a white version of the Nexus 4, which so far only ships in black, which could be another factor in convincing new buyers to take the plunge.

It’s not clear how exactly Motorola’s devices will fit into the Nexus line, but it’s also worth mentioning that a new device labeled the “Motorola XT1058″ has just been spotted making its way through the FCC, which suggests it might arrive very soon. What precious little info the filing contains suggests that this could be the fabled XFON we’ve been hearing Motorola is working on for Google, and it could theoretically make an I/O appearance, but this could also be yet another smartphone already on Motorola’s roadmap pre-acquisition, and there’s no guarantee we’ll see it at the show either way.

Nexus Tablets

There’s less buzz around new Nexus tablet hardware making an appearance at I/O, but there are some indications we could see some upgrades there, too. KGI Securities analyst Mingchi Kuo says there’s a brand new Nexus 7 coming, with a high-res, 1920×1200 display, an improved processor and a decent rear camera.

Reuters also reported earlier that a next-gen Nexus 7 would arrive, powered by a Qualcomm chip just like Kuo reports, but they’ve pegged that tablet for a release in July, which suggests we might not see it at I/O after all, except maybe in a preview capacity. Google demoed the original Nexus 7 at I/O in 2012, however, before bringing the device to market in mid-July 2012, so we could see a similar pattern repeat itself here.

I’d hesitate to suggest we’ll hear about much more beyond the Nexus 7 in the tablet category. Sales of the Nexus 10 have reportedly been quite low so far, and that device was only introduced in partnership with Samsung late last year. Google will likely want to give it a bit more time to try to pick up sales, or might focus its Nexus tablet efforts on the apparently more popular 7-inch market instead.

Earlier rumors suggested we might see a Nexus 11 make its initial appearance at I/O, too, but while it reportedly sits on Samsung’s roadmap for the year, there’s been nothing so far to indicate we’ll see it at I/O.

Nexus Q (LOL)

We won’t see Google’s bizarre boondoggle make an appearance at this year’s conference, and we didn’t really need AllThingsD’s reported confirmation of that fact to predict its absence, but it’s nice to have it.

The Nexus Q was Google’s attempt at answering the Apple TV and AirPlay if you recall, but it was an overpriced, precious gadget that essentially screamed “niche,” and a small one at that. Kuo said in the same report that detailed updated Nexus hardware that we’d see Google come back up to the plate with a stronger Apple TV-type device later this year, but it doesn’t look like we’ll see that at I/O.

Pichai said in his Wired interview this morning that Google doesn’t have “much in the way of launches of new products” at the moment, but that leaves wiggle room. It sounds like he’s trying to manage expectations, and a couple of upgrades to existing product lines would be right in line with something Google hopes will impress, but not on the scale of something like a new smart watch or the original Google Glass reveal.

HTC’s Facebook Home-laden First smartphone may only have debuted on AT&T last month, but it appears that the device may be a dud as far as consumers are concerned. According to a report from BGR’s Zach Epstein, sales of the HTC First smartphone have been so disappointing that AT&T will soon be dropping the device from its lineup completely and shipping all unsold inventory back to HTC.

If this report holds true (representatives from AT&T, HTC, and Facebook have not responded to our questions at time of writing), AT&T will continue to sell the First until it fulfills its contractual obligations to display the thing in its myriad retail stores.

And just how bad was the First doing? Epstein expounds a bit on Twitter, noting that the infinitely lamer HTC Status sold more during its first month on the market than the First did. That may not be the most fair comparison to make considering that the Status was HTC’s first foray into baking Facebook directly into an Android device (and in a time when the Facebook Android app was markedly worse than it is now), but there you have it. What’s also unclear is what such a move would mean for the First in other markets — HTC CEO Peter Chou noted at the Facebook Home launch event that the device would be carried by France’s Orange and the UK’s EE later this summer.

To be quite honest, it’s not exactly a shock to hear that the First hasn’t managed to whip the smartphone-hungry masses into a frenzy. Less than a week ago, AT&T slashed the on-contract price of the First from $99 to a scant $0.99 — it seemed like a curious move at the time given just how new the First was, but many took it as a signal that the sales situation was dire. The real question here is what managed to turn off consumers more: the First’s relatively modest spec sheet, or its reliance on Facebook Home. If I were a betting man, my money would be on the latter considering the thorough drubbing that Facebook’s replacement launcher has received from reporters and users alike and the fact that interest in Home as a whole seems to be waning.

We’re working to verify this rumor one way or the other, but for now it’s best to take this whole thing with a grain of salt. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a Facebook phone was erroneously thought to be taking a dip in the deadpool.