Rick Martin · · 2 min readElecom to Release World’s First NFC Smartphone Keyboard in Japan
Japanese company Elecom recently announced it would be launching this smartphone keyboard which makes use of NFC technology to connect to your handset. Typing on a mobile touchscreen has always been a pain, and this offering aspires to solve the problem, but for a pretty hefty price.
It was developed in conjunction with a Norwegian company, One2Touch, and requires no cables or bluetooth connection, just an NFC enabled handset. You will, however, need to download a driver from the Android market.
It will go on sale in Japan at the end of this month, according to Computer World, but with a very steep price tag of 18,690 yen (or about $238). So you’re probably going to be pretty desperate for a mobile typing solution to actually spring for this one. After the Japan release, it will be later released in Europe, Asia, and North America.
While I wouldn’t use it myself [1], I do like the possibilities that solutions like this open up, especially when you think about cases with physical keyboards built in (such as this one, for example).
Check out the video below for a closer look at how this NFC keyboard works. [Via Computer World]
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I think the best mobile typing solution I’ve found involved Text Expander Touch for iOS, using snippets to cut down on repetitive words and phrases. But of course the Elecom keyboard is not yet compatible with iOS, just Android. My colleagues at TiA speak highly of Swype, and that might be something to explore if you want to level up your typing. ↩
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