Smartphones have greatly revolutionized the mobile industry and we have witnessed smartphones slowly take over the market of mobile phones. On-screen keyboards are perhaps the most important feature of smartphones, however, the on-screen keyboard manages to take up quite a lot of space on the screen and although many prefer keeping a physical keyboard with them; the portability becomes an issue. TextBlade is a Bluetooth keyboard intended for iOS and Android and aims at making a physical keyboard easier to carry.
It is about 1/3rd in size when compared with an iPhone and still manages to cram a complete QWERTY layout on a mere assembly of 8 physical keys. It is composed of 4 pieces which fit together to create a block that can be used for storage and transport as well. There is a stand and a spacebar along with two halves of keyboard containing buttons. The spacebar and the two keyboard halves attach to one another magnetically and can tether with your phone or tablet via Bluetooth 4.0.
Each one of these eight keys comes with different symbols, modifiers and letters on it. Every time the user pushes a character, the entire key becomes depressed, however the TextBlade uses multi-touch technology in order to identify which character your finger was on when the key was depressed. Thus it can differentiate between W and X even though every time the same physical key is being pressed. This speeds up the typing process monumentally.
The spacebar looks a bit bulky when looked at in comparison but it can be justified by a couple of reasons, such as the fact that it contains the battery that houses a small USB dongle for the purpose of charging sans wires. The spacebar also has the function key – pressing down on the lower right side of the spacebar activates the function and the green layer becomes active.
TextBlade sure looks amazingly impressive in the video, however, its real performance will be gauged once it makes way to the market. It is available for pre-order at a price of $99. So, are you going to buy it?
