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The last keyboard you'll ever buy?

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MAY 20, 2002 - Jeff Kirvin

Canadian startup Pocketop has a new take on keyboards for handheld devices. Using infrared connectivity, the company's new keyboard talks to virtually any device with an IR port.

The market for accessory keyboards has boomed in the last year or so. Once limited to the ThinkOutside Stowaway and the Landware GoType, keyboards have popped up all over recently. Compaq - now HP - provides their own keyboard for the iPAQ, and small foldable keyboards for Palms, Sony Cliés and Pocket PCs pack the accessory shelf at computer stores.

Pocketop's keyboard is buy once, use everywhere

Why are there so many? Because each keyboard is designed to fit the sync connector of a specific device. There are at least nine different variants of the Stowaway alone. With no real cross-manufacturer - even Palm's "Universal Connector" is only available on Palm, Inc. devices - connector available, it seems inevitable that there will be at least as many different keyboards as there are different devices.

Pocketop aims to change all that. Their keyboard is designed to fold up and fit in a pocket, just like the competition, but it has one notable advantage. It doesn't connect physically to the device. Instead, it uses IR. Since every Palm OS and Pocket PC device on the market supports IR, the Pocketop keyboard will work with every Palm OS and Pocket PC device on the market.

The Pocketop keyboard actually comes in two pieces, detachable from each other. One is the keyboard itself, which folds on a central hinge, like a book. This should make it tougher than the ThinkOutside Stowaway, which has three hinges. The other piece is a stand with a retractable mirror that supports the PDA and bounces the IR signal from the PDA's IR port to the keyboard and back. This setup will work with any Palm OS device or Pocket PC.

Palm OS device users don't have to carry the stand if they don't want to. The Palm OS driver for the keyboard also allows for rotating the square screen of the device 90 or 180 degrees, allowing the user to set the palmtop on a desk or table with the IR port facing the keyboard, and still have the text on screen oriented properly in relation to the user.

Palm devices like the Palm V series and m500 series have it easier still. They can attach directly to the keyboard, sitting on their side and propped towards the typist. By using the driver to rotate the screen 90 degrees clockwise, the user can type normally and carry a minimum of hardware. The keyboard and a new Palm m515 will fit together comfortably in most pockets.

The system isn't without its quirks. Toshiba e570 and Audiovox Maestro users will have to place their Pocket PCs in the stand sideways and use Jimmy Software's LandscapeX or Nyditot Virtual Display to orient their Pocket PC screens landscape, due to the side-mounted placement of the IR port on those devices. Still, the Pocketop keyboard could be the first convenient, truly universal PDA keyboard - with the exception of the KeySync keyboard, which plugs into a standard nine-pin RS-232 serial connector, and will work with anything that can use a serial cradle. The obvious downside with this solution is however that the user has to lug around a serial cradle as well as the keyboard.



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