Need to travel with a keyboard but don’t have the room for a large plastic addition to your luggage? Perhaps we can interest you in a rather fancy virtual solution.
As much as voice dictation has come a long way over the years, there’s still a place for the humble keyboard. In fact, we suspect we’ll be tapping away for quite some time to come, which is why we’re always keen to hear about new keyboards, especially ones that offer something a little different to the plain old plastic efforts we are all so used to enduring.
This full-sized, ultra-portable virtual keyboard from Brookstone is just the kind of thing that piques our interest as a result, and we’re smitten even before getting our hands on one. In the past we’ve seen concepts of the iPhone 5 implementing such a keyboard, but it never came to fruition until now.
Priced at $99, this virtual keyboard is imminently pocketable thanks to the fact that it’s just so damn small. Connecting to a laptop or smartphone via either Bluetooth or USB, this little wonder works by projecting a virtual keyboard onto any flat surface, with users tapping away as if there was a real hardware keyboard in its place. Once you’ve got over how strange the whole experience is, this thing sounds awesome and we can’t wait to try it.
Usability wise, we’re told you’ll get around two hours of typing from the unit’s rechargeable battery when fully juiced, which should be enough for most uses. We’d like a little longer, but that would no doubt come at the expense of the unit’s size and weight, and we certainly wouldn’t want that.
The only downside that we can see here is the fact that the keyboard is currently experiencing some shipping delays after the first batch sold out. Early birds can expect their devices to begin shipping during the first week of December, but we’ve no word yet as to when new orders will begin arriving.
With an asking price of $99, the Brookstone virtual keyboard certainly isn’t the cheapest keyboard around, but we’re fairly convinced it’s one of the coolest. If portability is paramount and you’ve got the cash handy, a virtual keyboard may just be the way to go for you.
Although such an implementation will take some time to take off, but nonetheless it’s cool, and we can’t wait to get our hands on it. How about a keyboard which works by utilizing your device’s accelerometer? That would be even cooler!
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