Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Bluetooth Keyboard

Its hard to escape your roots. When I was in high school I was a super geek, doing assembly language programming on the TRS-80, the Commodore Pet, and the Apple II. Ok, so assembly was more about trying to trick out the computer beyond what you could do with BASIC, but the Z-80 and 6502 were fun to screw around with.

Over the last couple of days I have been spending some time doing some serious research on J2ME implementations on handsets and PDA's. Specifically looking at RSS readers and 'moblog' tools. I hate that word. Part of the research has involved loading a variety of applications onto my handset using Bluetooth. I can't continue to rave about this enough, I am a huge Bluetooth fan.

Working on the handsets I get so excited to see the app come across, but then I am back typing on a numeric keypad and I can't seem to get beyond how slow it is. This mobile keypad is the answer to my prayers. I will be buying this at the end of the month when it comes out. If I can use this to type into my handset, the spontaneous nature of moblogging seems as promising as I think it is.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you checked out the Frogpad? It's a compact one-handed keyboard. The Bluetooth version is supposed to ship this week. They claim you can become proficient with a few hours of practice. It looks intriguing, but unfortunately I'm on Verizon which doesn't offer a Bluetooth phone yet, so I won't be able to try it for a while...

Neil

Derrick said...

Wow. This looks cool Neil. I am not sure how the one handed stuff works, but this is definitely intriguing. Have you tried it?

Derrick said...

I meant do you know anyone who has tried it?

Anonymous said...

Haven't tried it, but I've read some reasonably encouraging reviews. Of course I imagine the downside of a one-handed keyboard is that you'd have to put up with a lot of jokes about why you'd want to type with one hand...

Derrick said...

But of course, that's obvious. ;-)