I saw it on Mark Miller’s blog and immediately thought that’s something I just need The Optimus Mini 3 is the first product that’s been announced with the new keyboard technology from Art. Lebedev Studio, where every single key has its own little display and can be remapped with its own animation, not only an image.

The first announcement I had originally seen from these guys was for the full Optimus keyboard. I’m also still wondering if they’ll consider licensing the key display technology to others – I really hope I could get a model of my current keyboard with this key technology. Then again, maybe the idea of creating smaller “on-the-side” keyboards with these keys is a very good one… usually I never look at the keys while I’m typing on them, it’s more the utility functions that keyboards sometimes have to fulfil that make this key technology interesting. I never took the plunge to get an Ergodex DX1, but I’ve been thinking about it, and this kind of add-on functionality outside the scope of “normal” typing keyboards is obviously the selling point for that one as well.

The not-so-nice part about pre-ordering an Optimus Mini 3 is that their shop works only in IE, and then they have this slightly funny payment system, where you have to enter your credit card details in a normal fashion for an online shop, but then you’re supposedly called back by someone to confirm. At least that’s what they tell you before the order – actually the process ended for me saying that a credit card payment couldn’t be accepted for my order, for no apparent reason. I’ll see what I hear from them.

Update: Apparently there were technical problems with the online shop earlier. I got a reply to my support request asking me to order again now. I did that and this time everything went just fine.