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The iPhone laptop

By Steve Litchfield on November 22, 2008

OK, it’s a fair cop, the photo below isn’t representative of a real solution, but its vision is something that iPhone fans have been crying out for almost from day one. Almost every Nokia S60 smartphone comes with the right drivers for a Bluetooth keyboard, i.e. you power the keyboard on and simply start typing into any textual application (email, notes, Quickoffice, etc.) Why on earth can’t we do the same with the Apple iPhone?

iPhone with Bluetooth keyboard

iPhone with Bluetooth keyboard

Now, I’m broadminded enough to see this from Apple’s perspective.

The situation’s nowhere near as easy as simply writing a connection utility or driver. For instance, entering text at the moment on the iPhone (or iPod Touch) involves the reformatting of the current display to show an on-screen qwerty keyboard. In a wireless keyboarded scenario, the display should ideally, of course, stay with full screen content.

This implicit dependence on a touch-screen way of entering text is built into many, many applications and I can’t imagine that it’s going to be easy to change the way the OS (optionally) handles text input AND make sure that all built-in and third party applications adapt seamlessly to the new option.

Plus there’s the low level Bluetooth connection driver to write as well, of course.

However, just because something’s not trivial doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. The very limited use of Bluetooth in the iPhone is something of a travesty, given how much competing devices use the technology (in addition to keyboards, there’s A2DP [wireless stereo music] and device-to-device beaming of files, photos and other media, for example) and it’s high time that Apple caught up a little here. 

Most of all, we’re only talking about software here. And software can be trivially upgraded, as we’re seeing with the v2.0, v2.1 and now v2.2 upgrades.

I’m dreaming that Apple will roll up its collective sleeves and put in proper Bluetooth support for v2.3. At the very least, I’d be looking for a halfway solution, to allow Bluetooth keyboard text input, even if the existing on-screen keyboard was present as well.

Mind you, we’ve all been crying out in much the same way for Copy and Paste for over a year, to no avail. Maybe Apple aren’t out there listening in, after all?

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net James Burland

    I agree Steve, I’d love to see proper Bluetooth profile support added to the iPhone.

    Do you think though that ‘Apple’s perspective’ might be slightly different from what you propose? For example, why do we not yet have official support for a landscape keyboard in the email app? Apple want just one standard way of entering text and that is the A.I. assisted portrait multi-touch method.

    I’m sure that in Steve Jobs’ mind, even adding support for an external keyboard is tantamount to a tacit admission of failure of the standard method of text entry, and in a way, he would be correct.

    Anyone who uses a computer daily will have probably put in about 10,000 hours worth of qwerty keyboard typing, that’s easily enough to make them an expert at that particular input method. That training only partially translates to much smaller keyboards like the one seen in your photo. I used that keyboard with the N95 for hours at a time, it’s great solution for the N95 which has no qwerty input method, but the iPhone… the advantages would be marginal, for me at least.

    As for A2DP? I could not agree more, I really do miss that about the N95.

  • Nikolay Andreev

    bluetooth is probably on the list of things Apple never plans to integrate in the iPhone.
    Why?
    Apple has portable computers to sell. The iPhone may be a decent productivity tool, but it’s no match for a laptop.

    If you have the urgent need to apply profesional typing speed, and you have a table to sit and you have the space for a fullsized keyboard in your bag….

    …..I think one could argue that a Macbook Air is a better solution.

    Also, very important is readability. The iPhone’s optimis use distance is around a foot a away from your face. Siting on a table with a bluetooth keyboard doubles that distance and makes the default sized fonts a paint to read.

    It’s not practical and serves a very tight group of users. No offence.

  • Nikolay Andreev

    BTW, if there is anything Apple had to do about the iPhone keyboard on a priority bases it is the ability to use landscape keyboard in all application.

    This will make a huge difference for many people all around the world.

    Take the Russian keyboard for example. It has 11 characters on the first 2 rows, vs 10 an 9 on the english querty keyboard. In portrait view the keys are very tight and only the landscape keyboard makes typing manageable for all us Cyrillic language users