Optimus Maximus From Art.Lebedev Has Finally Arrived

The team over at Engadget HQ have managed to get their hands on an Optimus Maximus keyboard presumably for review purposes. They've made an attempt to enlighten us to some facts we may or may not like to here so we may be able to make better purchase decisions.

First, the bad, other than the fact that it took FOREVER for Art.Lebedev to actually produce the damned thing, driver/firmware/software support still isn't quite there on either the Mac or the PC, but even less so on the Mac. Another downer is that they keys are really hard to depress, as bloggers, we all write, a lot, so our hand strength when it comes to typing is probably noticeably higher than most people's and they say they got tired of typing on the thing after about 30 seconds. They also add that the bigger the key, the harder it is to depress, thus making the space bar the hardest to hit followed by Enter, Caps Lock, Tab, the larger keys.

Now for the good, they say the screens on each key are bright and colorful, the Configurator (the app that configures the keys on the keyboard) works great. Other than that the only upside, and it's a big one, is that you can configure the keyboard for whatever it is you are doing. They more or less recommend that you stick with whatever keyboard you have for typing, but that the Optimus could be like a Swiss Knife for your other tasks such as CAD, Visual Arts, Gaming, you name it, and its very good at it too.

So, is it worth the outrageous price? Probably not for most people, but its nice to see that it's real and they are making them, personally I'm holding out for the Optimus Tactus which hopefully won't take years to produce.

[via engadget]