Freedom Universal Keyboard
1:37pm, 26th September 2007
Look at this:

Quite cool, right? Well, yeah! It’s the Universal Keyboard from Freedom Input. Here are my notes:
- The Nokia N95 is officially unsupported but it mostly works. It won’t type in some text entry fields in J2ME apps like the contacts list in Google Mail, but at least the main body of the email can be typed in a generic text entry thingy like when writing an SMS.
- This is not the same as the old “Freedom Keyboard” from the same company. The original does not support the Bluetooth HID profile. Unfortunately, many retailers sell the new version under the old name. For example, PC World.
- The N95’s built-in wireless keyboard app just about manages to connect to the keyboard (after no less than a crash and reboot), but the official driver is better. Unfortunately, it’s still not perfect, as the N95 is not officially supported, and it features a flaky and useless unlocking scheme which I believe exists to prevent people using their driver on other wireless keyboards. Closed source strikes again.
- The hardware is light, compact, and looks good. It can be locked in the unfolded position for use on your lap, but the locking mechanism feels extremely flimsy, and still doesn’t quite lock it flat.
- Typing in a terminal in PuTTY doesn’t quite work. Something seems to be going wrong with escape codes. I filed a bug report!
Most importantly of all, when you combine this with the N95’s slick TV-out cable, you have a portable computer with a keyboard and large screen! Nearly all TVs have composite-in sockets, and nearly everywhere has data coverage, so this is a brilliant mobile computing platform.
