Hasta La Gadget!

The Keystick is less a folding keyboard than a stacking keyboard. The overlapping sections slide over one another to turn a small, oblong bar of plastic into a ridged keyboard, complete with neat pop-out USB dongle to plug into your computer.

Unless you are using a keyboard-ally challenged netbook, we wonder who would actually need a portable keyboard these days — pretty much any laptop has a perfectly good one, and if you’re docking the notebook to a desktop setup at the office, you can just use a real, full-sized keyboard.

This one certainly looks great, though, apart from the weird retro sci-fi text along the bottom (None Bacteria Project refers to the use of personal keyboards and not an anti-germ coating). You can’t buy it, as the Keystick is a concept design. A quick note to designers Yoonsang Kim and Eunsung Park: make one that can hook up to my iPod Touch. I’d buy one of those in a second.

Folding Fan Is A Keyboard [Yanko via Oh Gizmo]

AT&T and battery issues aside, the compliant I hear most often about the iPhone is the handset’s lack of a physical keyboard. It’s difficult for many users to master the phone’s touchscreen typing, even with its built-in correction. 4iThumbs wants to help. The company has developed a plastic overlay for the keyboard, which adds tactile ridges, so the user feels something akin to keys.

4iThumbs doesn’t interfere with the phone’s multitouch capabilities. Users can leave it onscreen while using non-typing apps, if they should so chose. The accessory is available in both portrait and landscape orientations for $14.95 and $16.95, respectively. Or you can pick up both for $19.95.

We don’t know what it’s like to be blind, but we often suffer from acute blogger’s eye fatigue and would love nothing more to pound out our ramblings in a no-look manner — if only we could read them back afterward without letting all those ultra-harsh light particles and / or waves back into our brains. Well, a Braille display and Braille keyboard obviously solves that problem, and the BrailleNote Apex from HumanWare is purportedly the thinnest and lightest notetaker for the blind yet. It runs Windows CE 6, with a decent variety of accessible software, and is targeted at serious students and professionals, with 8GB of built-in flash storage, an SD card slot, WiFi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and a trio of USB ports. No word on a price or release date, but it sounds pretty kitted out, and these things typically don’t come cheap.

Filed under: Peripherals

BrailleNote Apex claims to be the thinnest, lightest notetaker for the blind originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Some people, including certain Engadget editors, just can’t live without a Ctrl key in the bottom left of their keyboard and a Delete key in the top right. Call it Windows shortcut addiction, but the miniscule adjustment of having to step one key inwards to do our thing totally messes with our mojo. Well, after slapping on some massive Delete and Esc buttons on its T400s, Lenovo is now taking care of the Ctrl freaks by offering up a BIOS option to switch that all-important key with the Fn button. Regrettably, current Lenovo owners won’t be getting it as an update, but the Switch Mode will be available “in all future ThinkPad models,” giving us yet more reason to be excited about that rumored X200e machine.

[Via ThinkPads]

Filed under: Laptops

Lenovo goes crazy, lets you switch Fn and Ctrl keys in BIOS originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Alright, would you look at this, Apple? We know you require your employees to pay in blood for every single button or moving part that makes it onto a shipping product, but would it really kill you to work in some proper Bluetooth keyboard support for the iPhone so we could enjoy the magical freedom of external QWERTY pads if we so choose? Take this particularly stunning KIRF, for example. Sure, you might find the iPhone-miming handset it’s paired with offensive, but is there really so much wrong with this flip-out QWERTY action? Do you enjoy our suffering? Please? iTwinge just isn’t cutting it.

[Thanks, facelessloser]

Filed under: Cellphones, Peripherals

Fake iPhone comes with magical external QWERTY keyboard you’ve always fantasized about originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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