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$1,500 keyboard gets some competition

Barry Collins Read more October 7, 2009

Art Lebeved’s infamous $1,500 OLED keyboard is facing competition from a US start-up that plans to bring the technology to a range of devices, including mobile phones and console joypads.

Lebeved’s Optimus Maximus keyboard caused a stir in the IT industry, by placing a small 48 x 48 pixel OLED screen under each key, allowing owners to change each key’s display to suit their needs. (You can see PC Pro’s video of the keyboard in action here).

There’s just one problem – the price. The top-of-the-range Optimus Maximus costs a princely $1,500, which is more expensive than your average new PC.

However, US start-up United Keys has just signed a deal with Foxconn to bring the OLED technology to a range of gaming devices.

The first fruits of the partnership will be a keyboard for PC gaming, which will have a row of 12 customisable OLED buttons in place of the normal function keys. The keys could adjust to suit whichever game you’re playing at the time: F1 changing to “Grenade” in Call of Duty 4, for example.

However, the United Keys website also shows a range of other devices that the technology could be used with, including Windows Media Center remote controls and mobile phones. The mobile prototype, for example, displays a button with the London Underground logo on it, presumably providing a shortcut key for the latest travel information, rather than having to delve through the phone’s internet service menus.

United Keys claims it “has secured patents for [a] broad application of display-key technology – including interaction logic between software and hardware, transmission of images over networks and the internet, and user customisation related to a wide range of input devices, including cell phones, remotes, game consoles, automobiles and medical devices.”

It doesn’t reveal when the first devices will appear on the market, but we’d bet $1,500 that they’re cheaper than the Optimus Maximus.