Leave the Laptop at home, SmartPhone is enough

What’s stopping you? For me, the answer to that question is the keyboard. My current smartphone has a wonder large screen, but even with a slide-out keyboard, it is not conducive to complicated or lengthy text entry. Interestingly enough, I had the same problem with my last phone, a BlackBerry Storm from RIM. Sometime in the past year, I decided to solve that issue in a fashion that had worked (sort of, almost) for me in the past with Windows Mobile phones: use a Bluetooth Keyboard. At that time, I had bought the ThinkOutside Stowaway keyboard. What a marvelous piece of portable engineering.

It soon became apparent, however, that such keyboards are useless without proper driver support. As ThinkOutside soon gave up on that business, I was left high and dry, with newer phones unable to take advantage of the keyboard. Last year I took the plunge again and purchased the Freedom Universal Keyboard 2 and in spite of great expectation soon discovered that the security policies associated with my Corporate BES server did not allow this driver to run. Although the Freedom keyboard is substantially bigger than the Stowaway, it is still a form-factor easily stowed in a corner of your carry-on and usable even on an airplane.

Last week, I decided to poke around again and see if things had changed, now that my smartphone is no longer tied to a BES server. With great anticipation, I discover the KeyPro drivers for Bluetooth keyboards. Interestingly enough, these drivers cover the Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and the Android platforms. Reviewing the list of supported keyboards (see list below) I found that the Freedom Universal Keyboard 2 was supported. Delving into the forums at MobileGear and others sites, I quickly discovered that Android 2.0 was supported with the current beta driver set for Android. I will confess that in a few hours of fussing with this, I have only gotten it to work for about 10 minutes total. However, my sincere impression is that this is going to work with a little tweaking on my part and some additional maturity on the part of the drivers. The author of the drivers is asking $9.95 to license this software after you verify that it will work with your Bluetooth keyboard and the license is tied to the keyboard hardware address, so I don’t expect you can use it with multiple keyboards. For me, this is a small price to pay if I can get this functionality to work. The driver also fully supports the ability to program the keyboard keys to invoke programs and functionality on the smartphone. I’ll let you know how this goes as I get it to work more reliably.

Compatible Keyboards

• ThinkOutside Shasta Keyboard
• Freedom Input Universal Keyboard I & II
• Chainpas SmartKeyboard
• Freedom Blackberry Keyboard
• Amzer SmartKeyboard
• Xema BlueKeyboard
• Snap-N-Type Keyboard
• i.Tech Virtual Keyboard

Short Features List

• 65 Key Support
• User Programmable Keys
• Audible Connect / Disconnect Indicators
• Backlight Brightness Auto-On
• KeyPress Sound Simulation

Tagged as: Bluethooth, Drivers, Keyboard