Optimus Popularis: Smarter than your average QWERTY

Slimline follow up to 2007's Optimus Maximus

Optimus Popularis: Smarter than your average QWERTY

1 July 2010 14:27 GMT / By Paul Lamkin

Remember back in 2007 when Optimus created quite a fuss with its OLED button toting Maximus keyboard? Well, it's at it again with a slimmer keyboard on the horizon - the Optimus Popularis.

If you don't remember then let us fill you in. The Optimus Maximus was a full QWERTY keyboard where the buttons could transform because they were OLED screens - meaning different languages, Photoshop buttons, gaming commands and so on.

The Popularis is a slimmer and more feature-ridden keyboard based along the same lines. Gone are the OLED keys, it uses LCD keys this time around but with a much bigger active area (64 x 64 pixels as opposed to 48 x 48 pixels), despite the keys being 25 per cent smaller at 15 x 15mm.

The numeric keypad has gone, it instead opts for the "fn" button featured on most laptops, but as a replacement we get a rather nifty looking widget bar between the numbers and the F keys.

There's no news on availability or pricing as of yet, but you can follow the progress of the Art Lebedev Studio's Popularis project on its Live Journal here.

Via: community.livejournal.com

Full tags

Hardware, Keyboards, Optimus, optimus popularis