Optimus Keyboard + "Transformers"

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Shadowknight
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Optimus Keyboard + "Transformers"

Post by Shadowknight » Thu Sep 22, 2005 8:20 am

The Optimus keyboard, with the custom keys that have pictures of windows icons, programmable keys, can have the keys setup for different languages, etc. Looks like the keys are low profile and it might be decently quiet.

A lot of people have been wanting more info on this board for awhile now, an article put out on Sept. 19th answers the question of when it will be available.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article.php?aid=247
Shows that it will launch next year in the Summer of 2006, and should retail for $200.

rbel
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Post by rbel » Thu Sep 22, 2005 9:28 am

Whilst I can see that the concept could be of use to gamers I am still looking for a simple, quiet, plain vanilla 104/5 keyboard.

SvaNtaS
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Post by SvaNtaS » Thu Sep 22, 2005 9:56 am

Have checked that keyboard out for a few months ago and i really think it's cool=).. especially for q3! :D HEHE =)..
Uhm a keyboard quiet? so what i don't care about a quiet keyboard...

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Post by StarfishChris » Thu Sep 22, 2005 1:57 pm

Keyboard noises can be intrusive as well - I want a silent PC, not a typewriter! However, the first time I saw this keyboard, quietness was the last thing I cared about ;)

Shadowknight
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Post by Shadowknight » Thu Sep 22, 2005 5:13 pm

Actually, the first thing I thought was :"Optimus Prime? Sweet!"

I think there are little heads of Prime out there, so if I get this keyboard I'll probably just assign that picture to one of the keys just because :D

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Thu Sep 22, 2005 7:32 pm

Yeah doh!

I thought it was going to be some sick optimus prime keyboard that had a fold-up thing to it, or a hatch that opened up to a double spring loaded missle with maybe a car that came out.

And, I'm NOT joking. :(

Oh well. It does look SICK though. I will be buying this if it is priced sanely. and can be purchased with a 3 year extended warranty. I dont trust screens under my furious fingers.

I have an Organic display on my HD minidisc player from Sony.

it rox. i had no idea it was part of a very neat technology. It doesnt have backlighting! the blue dots when they appear just appear against a pure black medium.

I think LCD sux to be honest. I bought a couple of higher end ones and returned the both for this CRT diamond pro 2070sb from Mitsubishi.

Oled looks promising.

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Post by Talz » Thu Sep 22, 2005 7:46 pm

That's pretty cool. 8)

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Post by darthan » Thu Sep 22, 2005 8:56 pm

That looks like an excellent keyboard except for one thing: OLED technology isn't currently being used in displays for the simple reason that OLEDs, especially blue ones, last only a few thousand hours before pretty much dying. Now, it is always possible this company has solved the problem, but if they have, why aren't they coming out with TV and monitor line-ups that would be guarunteed to be vastly more profitable than a niche keyboard product (yes, niche, I know it's awesome but how many people will actually pay $200 for a keyboard?). Now, I don't know about you people, but my computer is on most of the time which means my keyboard is on most of the time which means that in a few months of owning this thing I'd be noticing a significant fading of the blue colors and by the end of a year the blues would be mostly dead while the greens would be significantly faded. Somehow, I won't be ponying up $200 for that.

P.S. Sorry to throw cold water on it, it really is an amazing idea, it just doesn't work right now.

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Post by vine-au » Thu Sep 22, 2005 11:23 pm

speaking of throwing water on it - is this kb waterproof? ive had to implement a regiment of banning ALL drinks on my desk because they always seem to get spilled. i swear the keybooard is a liquid magnet. murphy's law goes into overdrive where a coffee & keyboard are in close proximity.
found some good info on OLED's
I have a Sone NetWalkman with an OLED but it is in NO way readable in direct sunlight. You have to be in strong shade or a portable darkroom to read it. maybe they ramped down the brightness to save power (it boasts a 50 hour battery life) - but i'd like to read some quality reviews of this keyboard before empying the wallet. does look slick though...

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Post by JazzJackRabbit » Fri Sep 23, 2005 2:31 pm

Guys, you do know that art lebedev is just a web design firm, it offers web design and advertising services. This is just another PR-style "concept art" to attract visitors to their website...

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Mon Sep 26, 2005 7:12 am

SHUT UP! I WILL HAVE OPTIMUMS PRIME AS A KEYBOARD WITH SPRING LOADED MISSLES!

StarfishChris
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Post by StarfishChris » Mon Sep 26, 2005 10:25 am

Well, I guess it beats that Transformer that turned into a cassette player...

Al
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Post by Al » Mon Sep 26, 2005 12:20 pm

StarfishChris wrote:Well, I guess it beats that Transformer that turned into a cassette player...
Never! Blaster was a dude... or are you referring to that mischievous Decepticon, Soundwave?

:oops: misspent youth...

Al

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Post by teejay » Mon Sep 26, 2005 1:19 pm

Probably Soundwave since he didn't even know the name :) and you gotta admit that Blaster made a whole lot less appearances. I always sort of disliked both those 'formers, since they had huge size differences between their robot and appliance shape in the cartoon.

Whaddya mean, misspent!?!

:D

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Post by mathias » Mon Sep 26, 2005 2:19 pm

teejay wrote:I always sort of disliked both those 'formers, since they had huge size differences between their robot and appliance shape in the cartoon.
You think the size change is absurd? In one comic some cop is able to carry blaster in boombox mode.

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Post by teejay » Mon Sep 26, 2005 2:22 pm

Exactly what I hated about them! Come to think of it: I was a pretty smart kid for my age 8)

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Post by pangit » Mon Sep 26, 2005 9:20 pm

darthan wrote:..........OLEDs, especially blue ones, last only a few thousand hours before pretty much dying. Now, it is always possible this company has solved the problem, .............
How about a screen saver for the keyboard? :shock: Now there's something I never thought I was going to need!!! :?

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Post by StarfishChris » Tue Sep 27, 2005 4:11 am

Actually...
Art. Lebedev Studio wrote:It will feature a key-saver.
Source

mathias
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Post by mathias » Tue Sep 27, 2005 4:39 pm

teejay wrote:Exactly what I hated about them! Come to think of it: I was a pretty smart kid for my age 8)
I don't remember blaster ever being carried by a person in the cartoon. Actually, I don't remember ever seeing blaster in the cartoon, except once in the background (Although he was in some of the comics a lot(together with bumblebee)). Was that in generation 2? I never managed to see many of those.

I was also kind of puzzled by some things, like why the dinobots had to be really stupid like dinosaurs, and why the constructicons and such were practically invincible, yet they got blasted apart when intimidated by the hologram of a giant autobot, and when some autobots impersonated the stuntacons, they were able to duplicate menasor and even fight him. And why was starscream so adamant that he should lead, even though he looked exactly the same as skywarp and thundercracker?
Last edited by mathias on Tue Sep 27, 2005 5:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by mathias » Tue Sep 27, 2005 6:52 pm

Intelligence didn't really seem to be all that highly valued amoung the decepticons. Even among the autobots, Grimlock wanted to be leader simply because he was the strongest(in the comic, although there he didn't seem as stupid as in the cartoon)

Rather than just demoting starscream, megatron did banish him to some island, where somehow starscream made the combatecons, IIRC out of old tanks and such, and somehow Bruticus was tougher than anything else, another puzzling thing. Although that does show that starscream was capable of a lot.

I don't think you can say Galvatron killed Starscream only out of crazyness, starscream did try to kill him/accellerate his death.

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Post by teejay » Wed Sep 28, 2005 1:33 pm

mathias wrote:I don't remember blaster ever being carried by a person in the cartoon. Actually, I don't remember ever seeing blaster in the cartoon, except once in the background ... was that in generation 2? I never managed to see many of those.
Thank you very much, I've been thinking about this this the entire day now :) You may be right about Blaster not being carried around in the series - it was the original ones, by the time gen 2 was around I had outgrown 'em - he may have been a very much oversized boombox. He did appear in at least a few episodes, of that I'm sure. Soundwave definitely turned into a walkman-sized walkman, though. The Dinobots didn't puzzle me, they annoyed me tremendously/.. I really wanted to be a good guy (bot, whatever), but I really thought the Constructicons and Stunticons were a lot cooler!

Btw, to drag this further off-topic, did anyone ever hear about those combination-giant-robots being called Gestalts? I read that on the toy review site I linked a few posts back... had never heard about that.

Btw, Shadowknight, good idea to change the topic title :)

Shadowknight
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Post by Shadowknight » Wed Sep 28, 2005 3:04 pm

I didn't change the title. This is the second thread I've made where the title was changed (my "Newbie" FAQ in the Newcomer's forum had the entire title changed. It was changed to say Read Me! but isn't stickied, go figure).

This got so off-topic it got dragged into the Off-Topic forum. I posted it in the silent front forum because it looked like a potential quiet, and neat, keyboard.

I'm going to avoid helping in thread drift in the future.

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Post by mathias » Fri Sep 30, 2005 7:08 am

teejay wrote:The Dinobots didn't puzzle me, they annoyed me tremendously/..
I take it you watched it translated in dutch? Otherwise you'd probably be confused if "Me grimlock smart, inspire dumb dinosaurs fight too!" is proper english. Was the dinobots talking translated into bad dutch? What was so annoying about them?
teejay wrote:I really wanted to be a good guy (bot, whatever), but I really thought the Constructicons and Stunticons were a lot cooler!
Because they could form composites? I guess they were saving the autobot composites for later, otherwise not so many people would buy the decepticon composites.

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Post by teejay » Mon Oct 03, 2005 1:22 pm

mathias wrote:I take it you watched it translated in dutch?
Nope, English (with subtitles though). Can't you tell from the way I express myself that the Dinobots had an important place in my grasp of the English language? :)
mathias wrote:What was so annoying about them?
Oh, I don't know: they were just rude, clumsy, noisy, much more Decepticon-like than proper good guys (hey, I was something like 10 years old at the time). I really dug those composites/Gestalts like the Constructicons though, I never thought about the marketing ploys behind their introduction time. I was simply rooting for the Autobots while secretly admiring the pretty big robots the bad guys used.

Ah, life was so much simpler back then 8)
Shadowknight wrote:This got so off-topic it got dragged into the Off-Topic forum. I posted it in the silent front forum because it looked like a potential quiet, and neat, keyboard. I'm going to avoid helping in thread drift in the future.
Yeah, I suppose the subject could have been split of, but that's not really customary on SPCR (if it ever happens at all): I imagine that would be much more moderator-intensive... and usually, we (the forumites) keep ourselves in check. For me this has been an amusing trip down memory lane though...

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Post by Mats » Tue Jan 10, 2006 8:44 am

Site says Feb 1 2006 now.

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Post by Cams » Tue Jan 10, 2006 9:34 am

Cool! I just heard about this on TWiT. I had to learn to touch-type in Russian as my keyboard is UK English. This kind of thing would work great for us in the office. It seems that most people can't touch-type and we have loads of nationalities at work working with accented characters and buying keyboards here is always a PITA.

I imagine it will be a few years before OLED technology is reliable enough to filter down to the PC World consumer, but I might just be an early adopter!

As an aside, I actually prefer a buckling spring keyboard. Sure, they're noisy but they are so much more satisfying for extended use.

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Post by Slaugh » Mon Jan 16, 2006 10:59 pm

Mats wrote:Site says Feb 1 2006 now.
Not really. According to this site (translated), Art Lebedev Studio should have a prototype with only "3" working keys at this date, and they'll try to release the keyboard in 2006. So it's only another prototype and if this one works as expected, maybe we'll see the final product by the end of the year...

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Post by klankymen » Tue Jan 17, 2006 5:07 am

JazzJackRabbit wrote:Guys, you do know that art lebedev is just a web design firm, it offers web design and advertising services. This is just another PR-style "concept art" to attract visitors to their website...
You're not the first person I hear saying that, is that true? O.ö

anyway, if it could be proven to last a couple years by reviews (both the hardware and the screens) I would definitely consider it worth the 200 bucks.

I would go well with apple products colorwise, i need to get me a 23" LCD by them ;)

But mainly, This would be pretty damn awesome with HL2, or PS.

the thing is 10 hotkeys is not too much, i have 17 hotkeys on mine, plus 7 more for controlling the media player...

Slaugh
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Post by Slaugh » Sat Feb 04, 2006 10:13 pm

According to Art Lebedev Studio, a mini-keyboard with 3 OLED keys is currently in production: The Optimus Mini Three.
Price and availability

The price of the keyboard is $100 until April 2, 2006. The keyboard will be available for pre-order this week. After April 2, 2006 the price will be higher. Keyboards ready for shipment will arrive on May 15.

Full-size Optimus keyboard is being developed. We are looking forward to laying our hands on a sample before year-end.
It's pretty expensive for a gadget. For about 33$ a key, I can only imagine the price of the final keyboard!


Image

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Sat Feb 04, 2006 10:37 pm

that's so sick. oled rox :D

I have an oled Sony HD minidisc player. I didnt know what OLED was, but it sure looked good when I bought it. brilliant colours.

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