iPhone gets external keyboard!
By Will Park on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 2:58 PM PST In Accessories, Announcements, Apple, Developer, Photos, iPhone, iPhone OS
Settle down there, sport. We know you’ve been waiting forever for someone to finally bring an external QWERTY keyboard solution to the iPhone and iPhone 3G. And, now that one intrepid iPhone jailbreak developer has developed his own home-grown external iPhone keyboard, that wait is over… almost.
The jailbroken iPhone you see here is connected via custom-hacked iPhone cable to work with what seems to be an old external Palm (NSDQ: PALM) keyboard. Thanks to some creative coding, this jailbroken iPhone 3G is capable of logging keyboard inputs and displays the input on the display.
At the moment, the external keyboard solution isn’t usable in any real sense of the word. The keyboard can’t be used to enter text in any application (jailbroken or official), so it’s more of a proof of concept at this point.
Still, the hack gives us iPhone users hope that there will one day be wired or wireless (Bluetooth) keyboard solution for jailbroken iPhones and iPhone 3Gs. The mobile blogger in us is dying in anticipation!
[Via: moyashi]
Thanks, Tom!
I am working on a keyboard and am going to sell the design to apple and sooner enough there will be one and it is going to be a regular sized keyboard possibaly smaller
It boggles my mind that one does not already exist. It would make the iPhone a respectable alternative to lugging a laptop around when traveling. Why has Apple not released one yet? Surely it would generate some nice revenue for them, and it seems infinitely more functional than some of the other accessories I’ve seen that have made it to market.
good luck!! great stuff…I want an external keyboard for my iphone….i would certainly buy one if ther was one that worked!!!!!!!
What I find really annoying about the iPhone is that you can’t calibrate the on-screen keyboard. Clearly, someone designed the default calibration with certain size fingers and at a certain angle.
Because I’m constantly not registering the right keys due to this default calibration, I looked for an external keyboard…guess what Apple has that locked down tight also.
I’d get one, but not wireless, I want to use it on the plane where space is limited. Or maybe I just take my DELL Mini 10 Hackintosh instead