Engadget has posted the proposed price of $1200 on the Optimus 103. And it’s for a keyboard with one of it’s bigger sellers gone. The color keys. They announced a switch to black and white a while ago, but I still hoped that the “extra” keys would still be color. But it doesn’t look that way. And you are paying an extra for that.
For as much feature slashing and resulting public outcry involved in getting this thing out the door for a “reasonable price,” it sure didn’t amount to much: Art Lebedev just announce its uber-hyped Optimus 103 keyboard will debut in May of 2007 for $1,200. That’s twelve hundies, for those keeping track at home, ten times the current price of the Optimus mini three 1.5. Sure, nobody expected this thing to be cheap, but $1,200 might be asking a bit much. Luckily, prices will be dropping to a “mere” sub-grand in September of 2007, and at that rate we’ll be able to afford one of these things right around the time that thought-based typing becomes the input method of choice. Well, at least our dreams of keyboard heaven were fun while they lasted. If you’re just crazy enough to try it, you can pre-order the keyboard on December 12th.
Looking at the “sample” picture I would wonder if “digital paper” wouldn’t of worked better. Lower energy and for making black and white keys it seems to me it would be clearer. And then use the color for the special keys. But here the money men and the engineers met and a marketing disaster unfolded.
Tags: Art, Hardware, Interesting, Irony, News, Review
