For Fat-Fingered You -- A Physical iPhone Keyboard
Meet the iTwinge. This handy little skinned device slides up over the
bottom half of your iPhone and draws a slow trickle from your battery
to power it. Lightweight, the iTwinge comes in at around 1 ounce, works
on 3G and 3G S models and will set you back thirty bucks.
Promising to increase your typing speeds and decrease your typo rate,
makers of the iTwinge talk a pretty good game. They ask you to give
them three to four hours of typing to make a convert of you, and
require no additional software for the device to work.
While the iTwinge isn't exactly pretty, if its performance is even half
as good as they claim, we could see this little number showing up more
and more among the business set. As a sort of iPhone training-wheels
for converts from other hard-keyed smartphones, we can see the appeal
there too.
Currently only available for order online (and not shipping until
November 19th), the iTwinge unfortunately remains the kind of thing
we'd like to try out in real life rather than simply see pictures of
and read fantastic promises about. Let these babies turn up in an Apple
store or Best Buy and we might just have a review on our hands.
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ifallen
September 18, 2009 at 8:04am
i personally would have made more of a "side kick" like extension... something that the phone slide down into and then the keyboard could flip down from behind the phone...in fact... if it detected the accelerometer from the phone than it could have alternate key-faces illuminated depending on placement...and honestly... that would be worth 30 bux.i would have never made a keyboard that covers the damn screen... that's just dumb.they should build in a detection setting for these types of devices to keep the virtual keyboard from popping up... saving you more screen realastate... that would be worth money.i bought a phone with a big ass screen... so i could see what it has to offer... not so i could cover it up.
MacMike
September 18, 2009 at 4:09am
Whoever created this didn't "get it". The Apple keyboard can reorient depending on how you hold the device, the keys can quickly change to show symbols or other characters, in other words - it's versatile. This device was made for people who used a blackberry and thought the idea of static, chicklet keyboards are actually a better solution. It's not. This is a big step backwards. Apple could have put one of these keyboards on their devices but knew that this wasn't as good of a solution. I would much prefer a bigger sized full stroke bluetooth keyboard that would work with the iPhone or iTouch. Now that would be worth it.
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