Previously on ‘Ranting About the Iphone’:
ok, so it’s become somewhat of a running joke amongst my colleagues that i still don’t have an iPhone. especially considering how evangelistic we all are about Apple shiz in general.
the points i keep having to reiterate are that compared to my (rapidly becoming less) beloved gPhone, there are still some ways in which the iPhone is quite severely lacking. a couple of these have been remedied in the time since i made my initial decision between the two, ie cut-n-paste, MMS and a decent (ish) camera (in the S at least), BUT there are still a few major gripes.
namely:
- the iPhone OS not only being closed source, but the app store being ruled with an iron fist, leading to many cool apps being straight up denied. not a problem with an open-source OS like Android.
- lack of non-system background processes, meaning apps can’t be doing shiz when they don’t have focus (eg checking feed updates etc etc). i’ve read that this may change in future iterations, possibly allowing one app at a time to be ‘authorised’ to operate in the background. we’ll see
- no hard keyboard
now the latter is the one that i keep having to justify to people when making these points (ok, gripes)… there’s just no substitute for actually tapping at keys. when i got my first pocket PC (an XDA mini) that was the one thing to which i couldn’t adjust… then the MDA Vario came along and solved the problem.
as far as i’m concerned, the gPhone has a nice balance between nifty hardware ‘borrowed’ from each major competitor- the screen of the iPhone, the keyb of the Vario (etc) and the trackball of the Blackberry. so until the iPhone gets a keyboard that will always be one thing that makes me go “yeah but…”
so, to the point of this post. is there any chance of it getting one? well, my intrepid reader, read on…
Episode IV: A New Hope
the first glimmer of hope came in the form of some dude getting a jailbroken iPhone to pair with the Apple bluetooth keyboard.
not as portable as a gPhone, but it’s a start, right?
Proof of Concept?
next up was the report of a new Apple keyboard that would house a dock for the iPhone, looking very pretty but with no info on if it’d happen. looks to be a concept with no uptake. shame really.
apparent concept for Apple keyb with iPhone dock
getting there
then there were claims from 2008′s Macworld expo of ‘the first bluetooth keyboard to be compatible with the Iphone’, even pictures of the thing… but at the time of writing, the ‘BTKeyMini” still isn’t on McAlly’s website, nor anywhere to my knowledge.
pic of the 'BTKeyMini' keyb
so, the idea is there, the product isn’t. TBH the above keyb doesn’t even look that portable compared to, say for example, the folding keyboard for palm devices circa 2001/2…
what we need is something about the size of the iPhone itself… enter this next fellow.
hack the planet iPhone
here’s a nifty video of someone who’s taken an external keyboard for something or other (looks like half of a databank) and hacked it to an iPhone… while i don’t pretend to understand how it was done, it was done. so it’s possible.
ooo shiny.
now to make it look nice. enter ‘Planet Mat’ and his concept for the ‘iPhone Elite’… notice the nice retractable keyb…
or at least something like his second idea (more along the lines of what i was originally envisaging) of an add-on keyb- part peripheral, part case. like this:
concept for an iPhone add-on keyb
isn’t it lovely?
so yeah, where the crap is it people? get to it!
things i have noticed while writing this post-
1) this was supposed to be a brief ‘i wish’ post. oh well.
2) no matter how many times i type it i still type ‘keyboard’ as ‘keybaord’. dammit.
3 Comments
Which Word Press template do you use?
is a tweaked version of ‘Redoable Lite’ by Dean Robinson
hope that helps!
How about using an old iPod Touch for a computer mouse pad connected to your computer via bluetooth. And still keep your big keyboard for typing. This would give you a super mouse.
Can you imagine all the things that could be programmed into this device.
I think that Apple should build the touch into their pro macbooks too.
This would let you use an older device for a new purpose.
You could even use apps on the touch to supplement your computing……
Suppose you wanted a clock, a timer, various handy things that seemed to be hidden deep in your computer……
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[...] sooo… does that mean that by then the iPhone OS will support a bluetooth keyboard without someone having to hack the shit out of it? cos if i could use an external keyb with an iPhone (yeah you can get some pretty tiny BT keybs) then that may solve one of my previous gripes… [...]
[...] a Comment Categories: Uncategorized some of you may remember earlier rants about the lack of hard keyboard on the iPhone (and iTouch and now the iPad, these shall now be collectively be known as ‘iThing’) and [...]