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I'd love to see a hardware keyboard. It's a chore typing on the iPhone screen. In particular, I think you could mount a keyboard on the back of the device, so

by jcnnghm 17y ago

I'd love to see a hardware keyboard. It's a chore typing on the iPhone screen. In particular, I think you could mount a keyboard on the back of the device, so that half the keyboard was on each side with T, G & B being the top keys on the left side, and Y, H, & N being the top keys on the right side. If the keys were touch sensitive, a transparent soft-keyboard could be displayed on the front of the device showing your finger positions. That should make it easy to adjust and allow you to touch type while giving you visual confirmation of your keypresses.

CalmQuiet 17y ago
What about just having blue tooth - and the capability of working with an wireless kb?
- jcnnghm 17y ago
  The use case I want something like this for is so that I can browse the internet and write emails from bed or from the sofa. A wireless keyboard would make it much less useful in these contexts.
JunkDNA 17y ago
I've been thinking about the keyboard issue, and I think that no matter what, the ergonomics aren't there for a keyboard, hardware or otherwise in fact. It's really inconvenient to type on a 10" tablet. It's almost impossible to do one handed (unlike the iPhone, which while slow one-handed, is very usable). Add to the ergonomics issue the fact that keyboards are not very useful for languages like Chinese, and you have to ask if there isn't another way that they might do input. Apple already has tech on the new macbooks that lets you draw Chinese characters on the touchpad with your finger. My bet is that they repurpose that for other languages and include it in the tablet. Handwriting recognition was a failure with the Newton, but I suspect modern predictive text input can sort out some of the issues that plagued that early tech. I have no inside information on any of this, but it just feels like something Apple would do, knowing how much Jobs hates buttons, especially physical ones.

by jcnnghm 17y ago

CalmQuiet 17y ago

What about just having blue tooth - and the capability of working with an wireless kb?

jcnnghm 17y ago
The use case I want something like this for is so that I can browse the internet and write emails from bed or from the sofa. A wireless keyboard would make it much less useful in these contexts.

JunkDNA 17y ago

I've been thinking about the keyboard issue, and I think that no matter what, the ergonomics aren't there for a keyboard, hardware or otherwise in fact. It's really inconvenient to type on a 10" tablet. It's almost impossible to do one handed (unlike the iPhone, which while slow one-handed, is very usable). Add to the ergonomics issue the fact that keyboards are not very useful for languages like Chinese, and you have to ask if there isn't another way that they might do input. Apple already has tech on the new macbooks that lets you draw Chinese characters on the touchpad with your finger. My bet is that they repurpose that for other languages and include it in the tablet. Handwriting recognition was a failure with the Newton, but I suspect modern predictive text input can sort out some of the issues that plagued that early tech. I have no inside information on any of this, but it just feels like something Apple would do, knowing how much Jobs hates buttons, especially physical ones.