For the last few years, geeks everywhere have been drooling over the “Optimus Keyboard” by Art Lebedev. For the uninformed, the Optimus Keyboard is a full-sized keyboard boasting an OLED display on every key so that the images on the keys can reconfigure dynamically to match the running application. You can hit his website for some interesting artistic renderings of it in “Quake” mode showing the weapons & directional arrows, and in “Photoshop” mode showing all the tools.

Every geek wants one of these things, but noone really knows how much one will cost. ~130 OLED’s can’t be cheap, but some people (Like government institutions /wink) don’t care how much it costs. Over the last couple of years, the designer has levied the popularity of the Optimus into the Mini 3 and the Upravlator. Both interesting ideas, but mere ghosts of the possibilities in the true Optimus. The Mini 3 sells for around $130-$150, with proceeds funding the development of the Optimus. But if 3 screens are $130, what would be the ungodly price of a full keyboard?

Unfortunately, we may never know. Over the last few months, they’ve begun leaking information about the Optimus and alot of sad announcements have been made:

  • October 16th – Screens will be only 32×32 pixels (Smaller than the Mini3), and will not use OLED afterall.
  • October 26th – Keyboard scaled down from 113 keys to 103
  • November 10th – 11 Programmable keys stripped from the left side (if you miss them, you can buy the “Upravlator”, whenever that comes out)
  • November 21st – Many keys of “secondary importance” will not have an LCD display.. Evidently both shifts, the spacebar, enter key, arrow keys, and the numeric keypad are of “secondary importance”, although I’ld love to see anyone try to type without a spacebar or enter key.
  • November 27th - All the keys with displays will be Black and White.

Of course, all these changes were made to lower the price to something reasonable while targeting the “90%” of the market. What I don’t understand is that a keyboard like this won’t be used by the 90%, rather by the 10%. The 10% that want, and would be willing to pay for, the extra keys with color displays. I know that even as excited as we were about finally getting Optimus keyboards for the office, we don’t really see the usefulness of the one portrayed above, and I doubt we’re alone.

Of course, the “Optimus 103″ will make money for the “Optimus 113″ and “Optimus 133″, but if noone buys the first will the others ever appear?

Update

  • November 29th – An announcement is made that the Optimus 103 will cost $1200.  One Thousand, two hundred dollars. 

He’s stated earlier that the price will be announced publicly on December 12th, so with any luck this is a joke.  If it’s not, then I think we might have just witnessed the death of the Optimus.
[tag:optimus][tag:artlebedev][tag:keyboard][tag:hardware]

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