Look beyond the rubbish camera work and here we have the first live video of Optimus’ Maximus keyboard showing video on one of its OLED screens. And while whoever was filming didn’t tweak their focus well enough to give much of an impression of screen quality, at least the frame-rate appears to be reasonable – after all, you’re unlikely to be watching a full-length feature film on your F11 key!
I know, I know, we said we’d take it easy on the Optimus Maximus coverage, but Art Lebedev’s cunning OLED “all things to all men (as long as they’re rich)” keyboard is due to grab headlines again with some further good and bad news. The former is that in recent testing (as seen in this photo) the Maximus passed preliminary wireless interference tests required for CE and FCC approval; the bad is that a potential shortage of OLED controller supplies (it’s just like Optimus Prime all over again; there’ll be a lot of disappointed kids on Christmas morning) may push the release schedule back once again.
Perhaps it’s a slow Friday, perhaps white is the new black, or perhaps people just love renders of unreleased keyboards, but Optimus’ news that their Maximus OLED keyboard will have – shock horror! – a white casing, rather than the black or dark-grey so far seen in images, has flooded the internet.
Although I well accept that I’m only feeding the hype by posting photos, it’s so nice to see an Optimus Maximus keyboard actually showing something other than dull coloured blocks on each key that I’m saying “sod it” and posting anyway.
Man, it seems like the people over in Moscow get everything cool before the rest of the world. I admit that might be a bit of an overstatement. In fact, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that people in Moscow have gotten before it has shown up in the US. Except for the Optimus Maximus keyboard that is.
Good grief, is this an actual, real-life, not-a-render photo of Optimus’ Maximus “each key an OLED” keyboard? Pieced together to show the difference between the tinted clear key-caps (e.g. the non-single-sized keys in this photo) and the untinted keys (all the single keys), it has the honour of being the first ever working prototype we’ve seen.
It seems that the highly anticipated (and priced) Optimus Maximus keyboard has finally gotten a release date.
What’s that, good news coming from the guys and gals over at Art Lebedev Studios? Sometimes it feels like you’re tempting fate just mentioning the Optimus keyboard; much like in Peter Pan where just saying “I don’t believe in fairies” kills one of the little flutterers, any positive mention of the keyboard-of-screens results in a dead OLED supplier.
It’s a roller-coaster world, the crazy keyboard business. Who would’ve thought it could be so topsy-turvy; thank sweet Nancy Reagan for Art Lebedev and his Optimus project, as close to a soap opera in tech-land as you can get. It turns out that, after a modicum of positive press at the news that they’d finally decided on an OLED supplier, key layout and rough delivery timetable, now their supplier “has some serious financial troubles” and they’re back to searching the back streets and alleyways for an alternative.
Still, you get nowhere in this world without being gung-ho, and so they’re carrying on making the keyboard chassis while a crack team of OLED-scouts trawls for fresh supplies. Estimated delivery has, inevitably, fallen to December, though I wouldn’t organise your life around that if I were you.
Bad News and Good News [Optimus Project]
Oh, for crap’s sake! Optimus, you disappoint me. After promising – yes, promising – to have a working OLED keyboard prototype at CeBIT, Optimus are practising their back-peddling and saying that it’s not ready yet. What they have been able to bring along is a new price - up from $1,200 to $1,490 – and news of how exactly they’re going to make those keys replaceable. Apparently rather than the OLED display moving, it’s the transparent key-cap on top of it that somehow slides around; that’s how they’ll be able to sell you replacements for a mere $10 each.
They’ve changed the name, too, and have obviously been reading The Big Book of Distract the Consumer; it’ll no longer be called the 103, but instead the Optimus Maximus. Seems inevitable that such a title will only draw attention to the maximus-pricimus.
Edit: More official photos after the cut… including the return of the left-side key panel!
JP
