Smartype lets you see what you’re typing on a built-in screen, without shifting your eyes from keys to screen. It has apps, too.
Like many other successful business people, Israeli serial entrepreneur
Dov Moran – best known as one of the geniuses behind the Disk-On-Key – has a deep, dark secret: He is a hunt-and-peck typist.
When he started wearing multifocals in his 50s, emailing got even
more laborious as Moran adjusted his field of vision from keyboard to
screen and back.
The result of Moran’s frustration is
Smartype,
an updated keyboard now hitting the e-market at just a hair under $100.
Intended to transform typing for people of all ages and keyboarding
abilities, it’s expected to roll out gradually to brick-and-mortar
stores in the US, Europe and Asia in 2013.
Smartype’s main feature is a built-in liquid crystal display (LCD)
screen just above the keys. This cuts down on eye and neck strain,
allowing users to see what they’re typing in real time while minimizing
keystroke errors.
The product also comes loaded with basic widgets including email
notification, clock, photo viewer and weather updates. Additional bells
and whistles, such as a scrolling news reader and stock ticker, as well
as social network apps, are soon to follow.
Hands off my QWERTY
Moran had previously invested in Comfyware, a developer of keyboards
for kids, but he never planned to revolutionize typing. A casual
conversation with Uri Brison, then head of a group evaluating user
experience at the ill-fated Moran smartphone startup Modu, provided the
spark for Smartype.
“I came into Dov’s office one day while he was writing emails,”
Brison relates to ISRAEL21c, “and he told me that he felt the setup of
his desktop wasn’t comfortable enough. He said that maybe we could
improve on this, and he came up with the simple idea of embedding an LCD
screen in a keyboard to make it easier to type without having to lift
your eyes up to the screen constantly.”
In 2010, Moran and Brison founded KeyView to give life to Moran’s idea.
“I had looked at the literature and found there was a known
split-focus problem with classic keyboards,” says Brison. “Most people
hunt and peck. Even good touch typists spend six- to 10-second bursts
typing and then turn their focus momentarily to the keyboard to reorient
their hands. This slows down typing and makes the experience less
productive than it can be.”
The KeyView team at first thought to revamp the QWERTY keyboard
layout, which is virtually unchanged from the time it was patented in
1867 — despite the fact that it was designed to optimize the movement of
the letter hammers striking the ink ribbon in a manual typewriter and
has nothing to do with efficient typing.
Another Israeli startup,
Snapkeys,
is working to replace QWERTY with a radically new form of typing for
smartphones. And Brison learned that several companies tried different
approaches to reconfiguring PC keyboards in years past, but their
efforts didn’t catch on with the public.
“We therefore decided we cannot touch the layout but could play with
the physical structure and design,” says Brison. “We made some subtle
changes and will introduce more, but we’re starting with the screen and
not everything at once.”
What began as a project to simplify typing led to the realization
that an LCD screen close to the fingers is also a perfect display space
for all sorts of information and keyboard apps.
“We have an open API [application programming interface] so that
third-party or independent developers can make apps that reside in our
keyboard,” says Brison. “We think there are lot of interesting things
that can be done.”
Thumbs-up from buyers
Set up on the bucolic moshav (cooperative village) Yarkona near Hod
Hasharon, which also houses Moran’s smart TV startup Comigo, KeyView
employs a team of 10 dedicated to software and electronics design based
on the company’s patents.
- An embedded screen lets Smartype users see what they’re typing without looking up at the screen. Photo by Amos Bar-Ze’ev
Outside experts in ergonomics, electronics, plastics, mechanics,
structural design, programming and manufacturing were brought in to
perfect the product, which was debuted by KeyView at the January 2012
Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
“We showed our first prototypes there, got the thumbs-up from buyers
from large retail chains and then raised money for actual
manufacturing,” says Brison.
Manufacturing and assembly takes place in China, while all the
electronic, mechanical and plastic design and software is done in
Israel.
Smartype Hebrew/English launches first, via ecommerce sites, at the
beginning of November. In the following months, models geared to
different languages will become available. Brison explains that the
software is multilingual, so it’s just a matter of changing the letters
on the keys.
“We will work with local distributors in each country with experience
in the computer peripherals market, accompanied by ecommerce sales,”
Brison says.
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