external keyboards

Have you been wishing for the ability to hook up a keyboard to your iPhone and do away with those annoying touch keys? Well if you have, ION Audio may have a solution for you. It's called the iType and it's a full-sized keyboard that you can hook up to your iPhone using the dock connector. It works just as you'd expect a keyboard to work, with one catch; you have to use the iType app. You see, Apple opened the iPhone's dock connector and Bluetooth to developers with iPhone 3.0, but that access is limited to specific applications, not system-wide drivers. This means that everything you type on the iType keyboard has to be entered with the iType app and then copied out to your other apps.

Pricing and availability of the iType have not been announced, but it does exist and work, per hands-on experiences from several blogs at CES 2010.

Proving once again that sometimes what seems like the most complicated way of doing something can be the simplest and most effective, a few brilliant engineers with Perceptive Development have successfully connected an infrared keyboard with an iPhone without jailbreaking the device! Most impressively of all, they did it for less than $20 using the headphone port. (Videos after the break.)