Another Update from Freedom Input: More Info on Bluetooth Keyboard Drivers – Beta Drivers Tested

by Brent on May 21, 2010 · 2 comments

by Brent on May 21, 2010 · 2 comments

Freedom Input

This morning, user Tullen posted a comment pointed towards Freedom Input (makers of the Freedom Pro Keyboard). Paul Bowles of Freedom Input responded in short order. As this is useful information for everyone concerned, I wanted to pull it into better view:

Tullen May 14, 2010 at 9:06 am

Hi.
First of all I want to apologize for my bad spelling.

After reading through this page with its comments I still don’t really know if this works with only the Freedom Pro Keyboard.or also with the Freedom Universal Bluetooth Keyboard 2. You mention the Freedom Universal Keyboard 2 in the article, but the link is to a Freedom Pro Keyboard. Also when you look at the official driver being developed it seems like it only works with the Freedom Pro Keyboard.

The reason I’m asking is that I live in Sweden and we have some special letters. I can get the Freedom Universal Keyboard with swe layout but cant find Freedom Pro Keyboard with it.
Another way to work around it is as you do on a laptop for example. You can change the layout to swe in the software and then just use ctrl and the keys to the right of L and P to get the letters in swe, but would this work on a android phone with the Freedom Pro Keyboard?

The phone I want to use this with is the Samsung Beam http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i8520_beam-3150.php with TouchWiz 3.0 UI.
Any thoughts?

Kind Regards / Tullen

REPLY

Paul Bowles – Freedom Input May 14, 2010 at 11:20 am
@tullen From our point of view (Freedom Input) we are only developing drivers for the Freedom Pro Keyboard. I believe the Keypro drivers do work with our previous keyboards though.
We have not added Scandinavian layout support to our drivers yet (currently English, German and Korean) but it is planned. I’m not sure if the keypro drivers do have Scandinavian support or not (I think Tony from mymobilegear was looking at the Scandinavian version of our universal Keyboard at one point but don’t know where he got to with developing a layout for it).
So short answer is the keypro drivers many have support for Swedish letters (check http://www.mymobilegear.com) but our drivers currently don’t (though these will probably be added in the next few months).
The 2.0/2.1 drivers are available from http://www.otadrivers.com (go to the website directly from your Droids web browser). I have not had chance to update the installation instructions yet so there is no official announcement on our website about these drivers. If you install the drivers the instructions are the same as in the updated user manual (available from http://freedom.helpserve.com) except that when you connect the keyboard you may have to click on the notification in the notification tab to finish the connection.
Updated instructions will be put up on Monday and hopefully will get the installation video up Monday as well.

Follow-up with the Freedom Universal Keyboard2

Freedom Pro Drivers for Android

To test whether these drivers from Freedom Input were compatible with the Freedom Universal Keyboard 2, I pulled mine out and followed the instructions on page 19 of the manual referenced above. BTW, these instructions are very clear and easy to follow, with one caveat: When you are told to go to “Locale and Text” in Settings, this is called “Language and Keyboard”in Android 2.0/2.1, but other than that, it will be the same. Unfortunately, I did not even get to see if the Freedom Pro drivers would work because the drivers themselves refused to connect because I was not using the Freedom Pro keyboard. Oh well. The KeyPro drivers still continue to work.

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  • Eric

    I’ve got an Omnia sch-i910. I’ve had it for two years. Befor that, I had the Pantech PN 820. I picked up a freedom universal , and it worked fine with my PN 820. When i tried to use it with My new Omnia ,i had no luck. I then bought the Universal 2. At first i couldn’t got the keyboard to work. I found a file in the windows folder, opened it and the drivers page opened. Made a shortcut to the page, and could now use the keyboard. A year later, a rom upgrade came out for the phone. I installed it, and the keyboard has never worked since. Now i hear the pro drivers will work with the Universal 2. If i go with windows phone 7, what would i use!!!!!!!

    • http://simplemobilereview.com Brent

      Yeah, I hear you. It’s not like BT is something new. I do not understand why there is such an issue with keyboards. In my opinion, this should operate just like a USB keyboard does. You plug it in anywhere and it just works. Drivers are part of the OS. So I really don’t know if the problem here is the keyboard manufacturer or the OS provider. Whomever it is, I wish they would get this resolved!