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Today Artemy himself said on his LiveJournal that they are moving forward with the idea behind the Optimus keyboard. But for seemingly sheer cost related issues they are passing on the 100+ OLED screens.
Instead they are working on a model that uses one giant display and is touch sensitive I presume. They said they should start production on the model late this year or early next.
Currently they are working with a design based on a TFT display, which they hope to move to production and sell for $800 or less. Furthermore, looking even more to the future, they are talking about making an E-Paper based wireless model that I presume would be even cheaper, but slightly less cool. They are also working on a new Mini as well.
[via Artemy’s LJ]
![T-Mobile Dash 3G by HTC gets unboxed, first-impressions [Video]](http://www.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/thumbnails_150x100/thumb_t-mobile_dash_3g_htc_1-480x457.jpg){kind=small}
I don’t know, the e-ink idea actually sounds like a good idea to me, the only challenge will be getting it lit well enough to see in the dark. For something like a keyboard that isn’t likely to change all that often, particularly a wireless model that’s going to be on a energy constraint to begin with, e-ink actually sounds like the perfect solution. True you lose the animations, and the colors on current generation e-ink are more or less restricted to grayscale, but all told a re-programmable wireless keyboard with good battery life seems a fair trade for that.
As for the giant touch screen keyboard, I don’t like that idea. With something like a keyboard the tactile feedback is really necessary and anything that doesn’t provide that is going to be really rough to use. It’s ok for something like the iPhone because your always looking at it when you use it, and you don’t actually do much typing on it anyway, but for a keyboard where you’re going to be watching the screen all the time, it’s practically the kiss of death.