Hasta La Gadget!

Ion audio, a company “known” for producing glowing drumsticks and electronic drums (and also the terrible Twin Video camera) has bent its ample skills to making a huge add-on keyboard for the tiny iPhone. The inevitably-named iType is battery powered and has a slot into which the iPhone can nestle and recharge its own battery.

But look at it. Resembling an early word processor with a tiny four-line screen, the iType doesn’t even raise the iPhone to make it easier to read. With an accessory of this size, why not just take you MacBook with you? Ion seems to agree, as the iType exists now as nothing more than a phantom in Google’s cache. Possibly the site is being readied and redesigned for this sure-fire hit. Or perhaps Ion took the iType out the back and put a lead slug into the base of its skull, and these cached pages are the virtual equivalent of a careless footprint left at the crime scene.

We all want a physical keyboard for when we need to bang out an emergency article on the iPhone, but it should be smaller than a laptop and have a vague sense of design at least. The iType looks like somebody drunkenly sketched it on a napkin and then, somehow, that sketch was fed into a 3D printer.

Ion iType Transforms iPhone Into an Ultra-Portable Desktop Computer [ION, Google cache]

Wow! iPhone gets a full-size, QWERTY keyboard. Will Apple crush it? [Raw Feed]