Hands-on with Optimus Maximus (at last!)
By Paul Miller 
posted November 21st 2007 2:58PM
posted November 21st 2007 2:58PM
posted November 21st 2007 2:58PM
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MMM, this would bbe great for World of Warcraft - imagine each key mapped to an ability or spell or a macro and change the key to the icon of that ability or spell. Coundowns for cooldowns right on top. Also for healing you could have the key show a percentage of health of a party member and allow to heal them with a keypress with different spells used with modifier keys.
I'll be more than happy to direct you to the local rehab center bro.
http://www.engadget.com/gallery/hands-on-with-optimus-maximus-at-last/501576/
haha, check out the integrated pr0n button. These guys thought of everything.
Now its worth $$$$.
The xps one one wouud've been a hella of a lot better if it got this keyboard.
That could be the biggest game of whack-a-mole ever!!!!
genius!
The keeping it really Fake version: Megatron Minimus
http://uk.gizmodo.com/colorkeyboardkids-thumb.jpg
am I missing something. there is no button thats looks like pron, or is everyone refering to the button with the two girls, if so you all should know thats TaTu, the Russian singers.
TaTu was porn enough for me
Personally, I'm digging the Mac shortcut key icons.
I've yet to see hands in these hand-on ;)
Do the keys allow for animation? THAT would be amazing! Imagine having them animate in sync to make a bigger picture! Wait, maybe you could take recordings and convert them to show on the keyboard!! This is DUMB. Get a touchscreen monitor and use it as a keyboard. No, get 5 touchscreen monitors and use ALL of them as keyboards for the same price!
People like you are going to make the world of ergonomics and touch-typing go to a hellish pit to make room for your sleek, but horridly depressing, touch-sensitive keyboards.
Print a picture of a keyboard out. Put it on a table. Pretend to type. Yes, that's what it will be like in your perfect world. Kill me now, please.
I'm in the city this week, so I think i'll head over to SoHo to check it out.
If anyone's interested, the information on the store's location is here : http://www.wired.com/promo/wiredstore/location.html
60 Greene St.
New York, NY 10012
When the Oxy Clean guy starts selling these at 3am for the low price of $19.99 I'm all over it.
I can't wait until this is standard fare on all computers. Brilliant!
What do you think? Another ten years & these things will be about $60?
You mean about 2-3 months right?
@joey:
I'm still waiting for my $100 SSD drives. Those came out a while ago, too. The tech world moves fast, but not THAT fast. 5-10 years sounds like a good estimate to me.
Gizmodo had it first.
Fail.
Is that a picture of t.A.T.u. under the youtube key?
Yes, it is ;)
I'd never want a keyboard that would make me cry if I split coffee on it.
Dearest Engadget...
I really enjoy all of the great stuff you guys have on here, but...
Can you PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEEEEEEASE learn how to take a decent picture??? I could do better than this with a basic point-and-shoot when I was 13. Especially using a decent camera, which I'm sure all your staff have, it's not hard to get a good picture, even in less-than-perfect conditions. Take a photography class, buy a photography book, or hell, just Google it... Learn about aperture and shutter speed and ISO levels and maybe even the rule of thirds. It's NOT hard to do... You guys all strike me as so smart, especially when it comes to technology... It really shouldn't be hard to come away from something like this with a decent set of pictures. It's too easy a problem to fix to continue bringing us photos that are out of focus, badly angled, washed out, or just all-around poorly composed. Get a D80 with a macro lens and an 18-135mm lens and you'll be set to take awesome pictures of anything; or just use a pocket digicam and adjust some settings correctly. Just please, try a little harder with the pictures... sometimes they can make or break a presentation.
This wouldn't just be good for Photoshop. Any pro app would have happy fun time with this one. Especially if any modifier key changes the image on the fly with no lag time. Think of the benefits with PT, Logic, Avid, FC, any decent CAD app...It's very practical.
inkscape, the GIMP, blender, rosegarden, cinelerra... oh yes.
...but then we have to make icons for everything...
You know, it would be sweet to replace all the Fx keys with different compositing effects in compiz fusion... ok, yeah. That's what I'd do with this. I can never remember where those keys are.
Gee, it looks like a.... keyboard.
This has a 4-5 year lifespan...
That's dumb
Ok, Optimus Maximus is out, now where is my Duke Nukem Forever ?
Well, the quickest way to get that would be to buy the trademarks, and scrap together a team of blender ninjas to build it on top of crystal space.
..or you know, ioq3 would work too.
I can just see something very similar to this ending up in mcdonalds and other fast-food joints in the not-too-distant future.
The real question is does Duke Nuken Forever come bundled with it?
No seriously. I was expecting them to launch together the day after hell freezes over. Has anyone checked the packaging?
I'm gonna be the first to say it (surprisingly enough):
It looks cheap.
hot damn that's a sweet keyboard
i'll even pay $200 for it
Ok, I am get two of these, or at least one of them and a regular keyboard. I like the idea of having a separate custom buttons pad (for stuff like photoshop, drawing etc.) in addition to a qwerty keyboard.
Why is it not plugged into anything but power? (excluding the 2 antitheft devices) Is it running in "demo" mode?
Ummm, from right to left I see power, antitheft, and USB. It's plugged into something.
I can't wait to see some screensaver-like animations which goes through whole keyboard! I.E. When you lock your workstation, some waves start going from left to right and others. Mmmh...
If I remember correctly, there was a bandwidth bottleneck somewhere that prevented that on the scale of every key simultaneously.
I don't know how the USB spec writers keep pinning maximum clock speeds on the protocols and still expect it to be used for anything serious. Your monitor, tell me what connector does it use? It should be USB, and would if it could do something simpe, like, say, scaling up.
So yeah, I'm pretty sure USB screwed it over. Sorry.
http://www.engadget.com/photos/hands-on-with-optimus-maximus-at-last/501576/
Is there like Japanese porn on the key next to the clock/alarm.
Sweet feature, watching porn on your keyboard ^^
What a rip off. $1500 for a keyboard of OLED keys. Is it that expensive?? I'd be tempted if it was $200 but that's all i'd spend on a keyboard.
I really don't get what's so cool about these keyboards. Yes, it's visually appealing to watch the keys change, and have the different operations be displayed on the keyboard depending on the current program, etc. But really, this doesn't seem appealing to anyone - regular users will never spend this much on a keyboard, and power users who use keyboard shortcuts and all the magic that this keyboard visualizes already know all the shortcuts, and don't look at their keyboard anyways! Am I missing something?
It's gorgeous. I want one.
For the buzz-kills who whine about the price, remember that the original Apple LaserWriter was a cool $10k when it was introduced. Laser printers are, what, 75 bucks now?
This IS the future, and it WILL get cheaper...