Because I’ve had a busy weekend (and because I’m the ed-in-chief, and because I can), I’m going to kick the week off with a blatant no-context-necessary tech-geek “I want one of those!” post. No, it’s not a Barnes & Noble Nook (though if anyone would like to send me one of those, I promise to be extremely grateful!) – it’s the iKey AK-39 wrist-mounted keyboard, as flagged up at grinding.be last week.
Thinking about it, I’m kinda dating myself by admitting to that lust; a wrist-mounted keyboard is very much a cyberpunk1.0 fetish, a desire from someone who grew up around computers as clunky chunky beige boxes with frustrating limits on functionality, portability and availability. In less than half a decade, the physical keyboard will probably be a complete anachronism for any device with sufficient gee-whiz to be both desirable and useful. I know this intellectually, but kids growing up now know it instinctively. This isn’t your father’s Kansas, Toto. Insert further mangled “culture shock is no longer something that happens to other people now that I’m in my thirties” aphorisms here.
Another (shorter) changing-fashions point – isn’t it high time that the fad for branding products or businesses by grafting a lower-case ‘i’ onto the start of another word went somewhere and died quietly?
I just added a comment on another blog that included the word “yoy”. I type with two fingers and can’t even type “you” without making an occasional typo. And you want me to type on one of THESE things!?
No, Tom – I want me to type with one of these things. Preferably while wearing scuffed leather and mirrorshades on top of some zaibatsu HQ skyscraper, while the wind wails through the cracks in the Fuller dome… 😉
What idiocy. Please get rid of the QWERTY nonsense, do some sane interaction design, spread the keyboard over two arms or the back of the hands – typning alternately left and right with both hands, on intuitively spaces keys. With this system both your arms are offline anyways when typing. I am sure an afternoon of brainstorming could yield ten far better designs. Like always the military struggles hard to ret(r)ain the dinosaurs.