Hasta La Gadget!

This is the Miniguru, from Guru Board, and it’s the smartest keyboard we have seen in years. We’re stuck with the keyboard, probably forever, so the Guru Board folks have stripped it to its basics and tried to make it faster and easier to use.

The premise is that you keep your hands in one place, with your fingers always on the home row. To this end, the number pad has been removed, and a nipple has been added just like you’d find on a Thinkpad notebook keyboard, so you can mouse around without a mouse or trackpad. Even the cursor arrows have disappeared, moved to be easier to use.

The Miniguru works like this: two “swirl” keys, on either side of the spacebar, change the mode of the entire keyboard. Pressing one with your thumb, for instance, flips the keys into a navigation mode where the i,j,k and l keys work as cursors, with other oft-used functions close to hand. To free up these thumb-keys, the alt keys have been shifted next to the swirls (in the same place as they are on a Mac keyboard) and the ctrl key has been shifted to replace the useless, almost universally hated Caps Lock key.

If you’re thinking that you’ll need to learn a new way of typing, you’re right. Mac users especially will have a lot of muscle memory baked into the Command key shortcuts they use every day. To this end, Miniguru has a clever approach to reprogramming the keyboard layout. Any changes made using the configuration software (and you can change pretty much everything) are saved to the keyboard’s own firmware. This means that whatever computer you plug it into, it will act just as you set it to.

This keyboard-for-life philosophy continues to the construction. When it is available (in the last quarter of this year), it’ll have proper mechanical keys. The keycaps will come in a choice of “clicky, tactile or linear” responses. You can also customize the colors of the caps, the tray and the nipple, along with a choice of vertical or horizontal “return” key.

How much will it be? We don’t know. The price will be announced when the product is ready to ship. As someone who already has too many keyboards at home, I can’t wait.

Miniguru Product page [Guru Board via the Giz]

See Also:

• Just My Type: Hands-On With the Das Keyboard III
• A Tale Of Two Keyboards: Apple Extended Keyboard II Vs IBM Model M …