iPhone Finally Gets Bluetooth Keyboard Support, But Only Via Jailbreak
December 28th, 2009
Between this and tethering, I’m becoming more convinced I should jailbreak my iPhone. TUAW have picked up an app off Cydia called BTStack Keyboard, which goes for $5, and finally lets the iPhone talk to bluetooth keyboards. They even ran a full test of it, and found it to be responsive, and not noticeably alter battery life—though some keys didn’t quite function properly.
The annoying thing is, there’s no reason this functionality shouldn’t be built into the iPhone as it is now. It’s hardly new, and for people on the road, it provides a usable alternative to a laptop.
I know a lot of people would say “why not just buy a laptop?” They miss the point. If you pick up a cheap, trifold keyboard off eBay, it’s around the size of the iPhone itself when collapsed. You could just leave it in your bag, and bust it out when you need to rock out a couple of hundred words here and there. It would be great!
In my imagination there is a device. A collapsable keyboard, around the size of what you see on an 8- or 10-inch netbook, that plugs into the iPhone via the dock. It has a built in battery pack, so you can keep up the battery life. If you’ve ever spent 14 hours wandering around a show floor with a laptop on your shoulder, you would know exactly why something like that would be awesome.
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