The Reader

I am using a Think Outside Stowaway BT keyboard with my iPhone. They claim 120 hour battery life, and that translates to about 3 months. If it is inactive for about 3 minutes it shuts down, but it will reconnect very easily at that point.

TMI:

They were bought out by iGo who shortly there after discontinued it in 2007. I have not been able to find out who purchased the Intellectual Property.

I bought it to use with a Treo 650, but the drivers conflicted with something else and I ended up forgetting it on a shelf. Since BT technology has advanced no drivers are needed to pair it, but the iPhone could not recognize the non-standard layout, so it defaulted to a vanilla qwerty and does not recognize some of the extended features of the keyboard, such as Calendars, Contacts, and Memo for Palm software and Word and Excel.

Retail is was normally sold for between $125 and $150. There is a current listing for one at $165, and one site has one available for about $3300.00. They came in various flavors for certain operating systems, probably because with BT v1 they had to provide specific drivers for paring and special functions. With advances in BT technology, now would be a great time to bring this back if they could get the price point to a more reasonable level.

I saw that Apple included the ability to us BT keyboards in iOS 4 and so I dug it out and tried it. If you have ever paired other BT devices, then you need no instruction, except how to make the keyboard discoverable. It is in about 0.5 font on the label on the back of the KB if you find one without the 3 page manual or CD of several Think Outside device drivers and manuals.

It is a full size 18mm qwerty keyboard with no numeric or function row above the Q line. Most keys have at least 3 functions accessed by 2 function keys. The only complaint I have is that they did not chose colors that contrasted enough with the grey key caps for the left or blue functions. Luckily the only blue functions you need are the numbers, ESC, and NumLock, and they are all in the normal relative location, except the numberic lock. So if you are anywhere near a touch typist, you will have no problems. The green for the right or green functions can be seen in most lighting situations and gives you the ability to type the symbols on the normal numeric row, a few additional ones and currency symbols. The Ctrl, Cmd and Alt are in MS order, and I have not found a situation yet to try them out to see how they work on a iPhone. Since Apple did not include these on the screen keyboards, I doubt I will find a need for them.

The tactile feel is like a slightly stiff, standard full size KB, and your typing speed will be almost as fast. The construction is metal and solid, but it does have a slight wobble. It has a detachable universal stand for your phone or PDA with two positions for portrait and landscape use. It folds down to about the size of a pack of Player cigarettes, and comes with a zippered vinyl case. It is a little hard to find the releases to open and close it the first time. It has a single LED to tell you is is active or discoverable. Being constructed with metal, I think it will be more durable that the plastic ones you find elsewhere.

If I were to rate it for function and use ability I would give it a 5 out of 5. I would give it a 3 out of 5 on price, if I had to pay full retail, because how many of us have a full sized KB that cost $125 and up?

Brent

Outside of Portland, OR,
on my 15" MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz, Intel Core 2 Duo, early 2008, Mac OS X 10.6,
& iPhone 3GS nearby.

On Jun 25, 2010, at 5:32 PM, Jim Saklad wrote:

> > Granted I am spending a lot more time on email on the iPhone now. Especially, now that I can use a BT keyboard. (No power draw for the KB from the iPhone. KB powered by 2 AAA's.)
>
> How many hours of typing do 2 AAA's provide?
>

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