Brydge, the iPad Keyboard, Raised Over $200,000 on Kickstarter | Hacker News Reader

Brydge, the iPad Keyboard, Raised Over $200,000 on Kickstarter

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27 pointsmichaelkscott38 comments

I know I gonna be downvoted for this, maybe I am wrong but I dare to say:

The success of this kickstarter project shows that there's no real use case for tablets except surfing/reading/consuming/procrastinating on the sofa and thus, people want their keyboard back—anything else can be done more effectively with a computer/notebook and/or a smartphone—there's just no room for a third device between notebooks and smartphones. Don't get me wrong I appreciate all the innovations in application and OS design (iOS and the lean ARM architecture could replace x86 designs) which came with tablets but I doubt that tablets with their clumsy form factor will take over the world.

I still don't get the success of these devices. It's so much more convient to type, to keep the finger movements small (with a mouse or trackpad or a small touch screen in devices like smartphones), to have the right viewing angle without holding anything warm or using ugly extra stands. Only when surfing around and reading sites I see a real benefit but then again: moving fingers to 'click' links or to go back is so much more work compared to a small notebook like the MBA and I spend the entire day with the Internet anyway, I have to force myself to do something else in the evening—I don't want to meet again the Internet, Facebook and Google when I should go out, meet friends and family. Or I just want to watch a movie and even this is totally cumbersome with a tablet (compare this use case again to a notebook like the MBA, I just put it on my lap lying in my bed and that's it: no stand, not getting warm, always the right viewing angle, I don't have to hold something).

Again: if you disagree reply instead of voting this post down—this isn't gonna be a flamewar—I just want to question, is there really a post pc era coming where tablets replace computers (I would rather guess that smartphones and not tablets will fill the gap and could get the main distribution channel for software).

I agree with you and I just wanted to add something.

I'm purely speculating, but I think they are appealing to the wider audience because of the 'cool' factor. They've been successful because of the way Apple positions the device. It's just a cool toy made by a company with a cult following. You use it to impress your friends, your coworkers, and probably because you want everyone else to think you're a geek that's into the latest tech. In short, it's a status symbol.

It doesn't offer anything new in terms of functionality. Everything you want to do in an iPad, you can also do with a modern laptop. Ok, laptops can't do touch screens, but I'll argue that it's not really novel functionality. In fact, as Brydge's Kickstarter campaign has shown, it comes with reduced functionality.

Let me stress that I'm not belittling the device. I'm sure it also has a lot of great technological feats packed into it. Only that it's secondary to the social/marketing factor.

In two paragraphs you made about ten claims that are just flat out wrong. You apparently don't have any use for an iPad but how do you begin to assume no one else does? Maybe you were just wildly speculating, but still.

I down voted you because an article on interesting new kickstarter project that pairs up a keyboard with an iPad probably isn't the place to rant against an iPad.

Personally, I like my iPad just fine 90% - 95% of the time without a keyboard. It's light, very unobtrusive in public, and easy to handle on a bus/train/plane. There are a few times, when I'm on a long trip, or going out for an afternoon and need to write up some material - where the ability to have a keyboard that could also be a case would be awesome; but it's not for the 95% case with me, it's for the 5%. Right now - I usually end up bringing my MacBook Air and my iPad when I'm in that situation that I'm going to be doing casual browsing (and enjoying the 10 hour battery, awesome resolution) and heavy keyboard input.

Give me a half-decent keyboard case and my next social trip will mean I leave my MacBook air at home.

And there are many, many, many people who are passive consumers of the internet - and really don't need a keyboard. And _Lord_ is it wonderful not to have to provide them with any IT support.

> iPad probably isn't the place to rant against an iPad.

It's no rant against the iPad or tablets and sorry that I disagree but I see a strong relation to this kickstarter project which proves that tablets haven't got the perfect form factor.

> It's light, very unobtrusive in public, and easy to handle on a bus/train/plane.

Where is the advantage to a powerful smartphone?

> And there are many, many, many people who are passive consumers of the internet

That's the point: the Internet made all of us to producers: people who weren't tech savvy started to do small websites, writes blogs and so on. The tablets bring the people from where the came, from TV, from just consuming and getting dumber and dumber—before they consumed crappy TV shows and now apps and whatever.

My favorite posts on HN are when people discuss why they downvoted people. There should be some sort of auto downvote algorithm for posts that begin with that.

I'm not sure whether one should draw that conclusion just because 1000 people out of more than 30 mio iPad owners backed a project where the iPad gains a keyboard. That's like saying nobody wants to buy black Chevrolets because some people paint them yellow. I use my iPad for all kinds of stuff, be it reading books, reading websites, listening to music, playing games, collecting notes, drawing stuff, or writing down notes. Some of that is downright impossible with a standard MBA (Like reading a book. It's possible but cumbersome).

Of course there're people that want the iPad more to be like a real laptop. What's not to like about a laptop that even under high load (i.e. watching a movie) holds for almost 10 hours.

Nevertheless, I think the gross of people doesn't need that. Most non-geek people I know hardly use their keyboard on their Mac/PC. Some of them can't even type with more than 2 fingers. For them, typing on the iPad touchscreen doesn't even affect their typing speed much.

I agree in most of your points but your uses case could be done with other devices better:

- Taking notes => smartphone, always with you and small

- reading books => ok but you could read them as well with your smartphone (4" display are big enough) or with an paper display based device like the kindle. I think reaidng is good with an ipad but rather for short-form content like articles not for books because staring hours at a bright screen, holding some (after a while getting really) heavy device is no fun

- drawing stuff => a 50 bucks Wacom tablets does a much better job or you have to get a pencil because drawing with fingers feels unnatural/clumsy or get the Wacom Cintiq

- listening to music?? => smartphone, always with you

- watching movies for 10hours => my MBP get 7h that's ok but anyway this point is more about the hardware architecture which is great iOS/ARM and should be done in notebooks as well

Have you read much on an iPad?

- Reading on a phone involves way too much page-turning

- When I turn the screen brightness down (and invert the colors in iBooks), I can read forever on this thing

- You don't hold the iPad in the air when you read on it. You rest it on something, just like you do with a book (unless it's a very lightweight paperback).

In my opinion, and many others', the new iPad is the best reading device that has ever existed.

I can't explain why, I can only tell you that reading on an iPad literally makes me sick after about an hour. I'm guessing something to do with the lack of resolution compared to paper or Kindle.

> reading on an iPad literally makes me sick

Being an active light source vs a passive one like Kindle/paper, the perceptual effect is different.

Sickness could be coming from various causes, including:

- you're holding it too close to you (which makes your eyes converge/accomodate too much): try to make the font bigger and put it further away (it will also reduce the resolution issue since you will have more pixels per arc-minute)

- brightness too high: turn it down (!), use light text on dark background (hint: for e.g safari, use the iOS accessibility feature and bind it to triple home click or something to toggle it quickly), when possible choose colors with less contrast between text/background.

- light sources around you: try to change relative light position or type of bulbs (CFC bulbs give me headaches for some obscure reason, while some LEDs one are too cold/blu-ish).

Thanks!

I will try #1 and see if that helps.

#2 does not work for me. I've tried using night mode on Kindle and Stanza and I simply can't read it well. It doesn't feel like I can track the text.

#3 could definitely have an effect, since oftentimes I'm trying to read the iPad in extremely low light. I will experiment with some light sources.

I do the same (inverting colors) on my 4" smartphone and page-turning is more often than with a book but it doesn't annoy me at all. And I can hold a very light device with one hand lying on the side or reading in the subway. You misunderstood me, of course you don't have to hold or carry the iPad while reading but at least you have to keep it in balance while it lies or stands on something and after a while I prefer lighter devices—just try a Kindle, this much lighter weight makes a huges difference! And, where's the advantage having a bigger screen when reading normal literature (with programming books I prefer the iPad because you need space for code examples etc. but then again I prefer the notebook over the iPad because the IDE is close ...)

"The success of this kickstarter project shows that there's no real use case for tablets except [...]"

I would like to point out, in a non-flamewar-inducing manner, that your assertion above has some severe logical flaws. For example, the success of McDonalds does not show that there's no real use case for healthy food..

At best it shows that Kickstarter is doing very well and some people dislike the iPad on-screen keyboard enough to part with money for the option of having a real one occasionally. Keep in mind you can optionally put a keyboard on an iPad, but you certainly can't remove one from a Macbook!

That's two posts in a row that began with a disclaimer to avoid downvotes.

Not that I blame you since I'll probably be downvoted for pointing that out. Ahhhhhhhh HN.

You actually have a very good point about not being able to remove the Macbook keyboard. That clearly has to be a focus of Apple R&D in the future, to make an iPad like device that runs full MacOS and is convertible to usage with and without keyboard.

We cannot be far off that, multicore iPads with fancy graphics can't be more than... what, a year away?

> make an iPad like device that runs full MacOS

iOS is designed for touch, OSX is designed for pointer. What you describe is Windows 7/8 and I think this is a mistake.

I'd rather have iPad/iOS evolve to allow more things that we take for granted in OSX. Thinks like:

- possibility to tell what's my default web browser, mail client, whatever. - possibility for apps to schedule time- and resource-limited tasks (e.g for Sparrow to poll IMAP without need for push+giving my credentials to a third party) and maybe ability to deny that possibility to the app (similar to location). - a full-blown local Unix access so I can run zsh/vim/tmux/python/ssh/whatever, even if it's jailed in a sandbox/chroot. - full keyboard navigation when a hardware keyboard is plugged in (e.g cmd-tab to work for switching apps instead of reaching for the home-button+screen is so obvious).

This gap is today filled for me by my MacBook Pro, and for others by connecting remotely to various machines via iSSH/Prompt. There's no technical reason not to do it on an iPad 3. But I'd like, say two to five years from now, to have such a shapeshifting device that I'd carry everywhere.

It looks like I would be interested in an Android tablet, but Android really is not there yet at the core (and by far, for a multitude of reasons), while iOS simply nailed it, deeply.

> some people dislike the iPad on-screen keyboard enough to part with money for the option of having a real one occasionally

(emphasis mine). And it's the key. The use case of my iPad is that it's simply brilliant when there's no need for a keyboard, and for those cases where there's a need to input text but the soft keyboard is more than enough of a compromise compared to all others advantages. For those same cases my MacBook simply feels like a hack. I won't argue that there's no room for improvement in various areas on iOS because there is, but I'm sick of hearing that "iPads are useless and that's it".

I think you're looking at it from the perspective of someone who is technically literate, which is not the segment for whom the iPad is life-changing.

You can give the iPad to even very techno-phonic people and they get the touchscreen interface very quickly. It's intuitive to them. iOS isn't scary and doesn't look "techy" like Mac OS X does.

The bigger question is whether these people would like iOS on a laptop. I'd say probably not, as I think they need that touchscreen interface.

However, my guess is there is a large silent majority who find computers unnerving (not scary, but not comfortable). They probably bought iPads, but realized they needed to type emails and such from home, so they're now looking for keyboards. Every time I get on a plane now, I see a good handful of people sporting terrible keyboard cases for their iPad. I think these people would be well-served with an iOS-based laptop. Apple could certainly serve this segment much better.

Tim Cook came out last week and said he thinks hybrid devices are a bad idea. Personally, I think they're leaving money on the table by not having a Transformer-style setup, or even a return to the swivel laptops of the early 2000s. My worry is that Windows 8 won't do well out of the gate (people want iPads because they are iPads and Apple have served them well), and Apple will take that as an implicit validation of their anti-hybrid strategy.

Some people buy iPads simply because it's a novel gadget in the same way hobbyists get into cars, photography or bbq grills. Folks who get serious about their hobbies tend to "gear up" on accessories and markets often thrive on the "prosumers" who are not really thinking about necessity but purely desire.

Those of us who don't subscribe to the hobby are bound to find some things superfluous. I get this feeling when I see a "Salad Spinner" in a Kitchen gadget store but I'm sure to someone it's a lifesaver. Just another hypothesis.

You raise some good insight. At this point, it's too early to concretely say whether or not the iPad (or tablet computers) will truly replace the PC. I also just do not see this happening anytime soon or ever at all. However, I do see room for a third device (clearly it's not just me seeing it but the staggering amount of iPads sold and used, the market is booming). iPad's success can be attributed in part to it being an amazing consumer electronics device. It's photos, videos, games, and social media capabilities are what sell the product. Productivity, coding, design, editing, and tons of other "work" - not happening on a tablet device.

Developers simply see a new market for consumers to purchase apps and that's why we're seeing tablet versions of Photoshop, Keynote, Documents to Go, etc. It's easy for them to push an existing product on a mobile-based platform and make $$$.

I'm fairly confident that we're going to keep using our notebooks when writing in XCode, editing in Photoshop, using Word, Excel and Keynote and doing tasks that tablets simply can't handle - keyboard or no keyboard.

The iPad also does a great job of presenting the web to the user when in couch-surfing mode but a lot of us still need a full-browser. The App space is rich, users love downloading apps, but we're still in entertainment mode here. I wouldn't be surprised if <5% of iPad users actually use the device for productivity. I regularly read HN, blogs, news, and do basic web browsing on my iPad at night (after using a computer all day).

With a concept like this Kickstarter project, the product fulfills the niche accessory market pretty well. People who like to spend $100+ on beautiful accessories to dress up their tablets will buy it. And of course, users that find themselves sending emails and writing documents on iPad will buy it. It looks like a nice product; clean Jony Ive inspired design, integrated speakers, solid materials, etc.

Tablets are here to stay and they'll continue gaining market share but they won't replace PC's for a while (if it has a keyboard it's a laptop, right?). This whole "post-PC renaissance" sounds like a bunch of marketing hype but you can't deny the staggering tablet sales numbers.

The dominant players will be Mobile and PC's while tablets have carved out a nice market share for themselves in the past few years.

Just because a thousand people back this kickstarter, doesn't mean the millions of iPad owners all want keyboards.

"The success of this kickstarter project shows that there's no real use case for tablets except surfing/reading/consuming/procrastinating on the sofa..."

Surfing, reading, consuming and procrastinating is 95% of the time normal people use a computer, and there is nothing wrong with that.

I have news for you, before you are able to write you have to read, a lot. Surfing, consuming and getting in touch with other people is also part of the creation process for a lot of people, maybe not for the isolated geek who has no friends and believes that real work is working on problems without interaction with people(as if their work were going to be used by androids).

There is more consumers than producers, this is expected. It is a tool, like a car is used for transportation, and not for changing parts of it like a lego.

I am a vim user, I know how to compile the linux kernel, disassemble anything and create super complex and amazing programs but when I want to plan where I am going to be the weekend I love the Apple multitouch tech so much on the map application. I prefer browsing web pages and watching educational videos on a tablet.

I can tell my parents or grandpas or a kid how a tablet app work in 2 minutes, impossible to do with a pc because interface is seriously wrong. I repeat, is totally wrong if people that are not geeks can't use it.

Some geeks hate it because it removes the "guru aura" they have over their family or friends as the only one that knows how to use the "broken machine".

I want it all, the power of a linux or mac machine with the intuitive interface of tablets. In the future you wont have to choose, you will be able to use ubuntu(or other distros, or windows, or macOSX) on tablets.

"clumsy form factor"??? You really hate those that do not believe in the same things you do, you are blind from your hate. It is agile form factor, I touch it moves, instantly. PCs are the clumsy ones. You want to zoom, you search for an icon, then click on it, then it zooms stumbled like an octogenarian.

I got the precise opposite impression. The keyboard is first and foremost a tool for creation, for writing in the medium of prose, code or in other textual mediums. When simply consuming content on the iPad I never find myself in want of a keyboard, even when I'm doing light typing—note taking, editing documents, and so on—the iPad's keyboard works handily. The only times when I've found myself wanting a keyboard is when typing for extended periods of time on the iPad, when I'm actually creating.

If you want better speakers for your iPad, bluetooth speakers like the Jambox work fine, if you want to do light typing, the iPad keyboard is fine, but when you want to get serious about writing on the iPad and creating content, that's when you should start considering a keyboard and I'd like to think that's why people are funding this project.

> The success of this kickstarter project shows that there's no real use case for tablets except surfing/reading/consuming/procrastinating on the sofa and thus, people want their keyboard back

I would say that a little over 1,100 backers for some iPad keyboard does not say much when you consider the tens of millions of iPads out in the wild.

I've watched their commercial about 20 times now - They hit 100% of the notes, symbolism, sex-appeal, simplicity, emotional appeal. Even the shot of them taking it out of the manilla folder on the white background is appealing to a particular audience that remembers when the Macbook air was introduced.

Forget about making keyboards; these guys have a future in advertising.

It's a very good (albeit overlong) copy of Apple's style of ad-making. However, the advertising industry values originality a bit more than you seem to think.

This is not that great tbh.

If you compare it to the Transformer Prime keyboard-dock solution:

* It doesn't provide a battery extension, yet has it's own battery.

* It connects to the iPad via Bluetooth, both using A2DP and as a keyboard. (So it uses the iPad's battery.)

* The iPad doesn't clip OR dock in the keyboard, it just sits in it, however secure it is. (A large enough force could knock it out or have it slip out.)

* The Apple symbol is sideways! (Serious business this one.)

It's funny to me that there are so many people on Hacker News that can't imagine why anyone could actually want/like/love the iPad. Even if it doesn't do what you want/need, it is a serious impairment to think that its success is a fluke, or temporary. If you can't understand the world from the point of view of the non-techie consumers for whom the iPad is a life-changing device because of its sheer simplicity, then the things you make will suffer as a result. Learn to empathize with the rest of the world. These are your customers.

That's funny, not a month ago, somebody on HN said “it seems the only successful Kickstarter products are all related to Apple devices”. This goes a step further in that direction.

So now you can integrate your own $800 iNetbook with lower performance and fewer capabilities than a $300 Ubuntu netbook from 2008!

Love my netbook, hate the ridiculously low-resolution screen though.

Tell me then where I can get a 2008 netbook:

with gps, microphones and telephone.

with accelerometers, gyroscopes, compass and cameras.

a reliable solid state memory so I can use it on the go(jumping or waving it while moving).

10 hours of battery.

made in Aluminium and not cheap plastic.

Scratch resistant 2048-by-1536 resolution screen.

Please tell me because I always wanted this, unfortunately I bought a netbook on 2008 that have none of the above.

A common thread of these high-grossing kickstarter threads is the production value of the demo vids.

My sense is that Kickstarter is less of a paradigm shift than it is another venue for great marketers

Yes, but this is something that's accessible to the masses. The first thing that pops to mind is the Kash Maxwell's Hot Dog Cart where the fellas just wanted to raise 3 and a half grand and get some exposure. The video was hilarious, and you know what, next time I visit my old lady's family in Rockford, IL, I'm taking the 30 minute trip over to Woodstock, IL to get a dang hotdog because they looked DELICIOUS.

Yes, some of these are bullcrap. As long as the premiums are fair or exchange for product, I'm okay with it.

Funny.. I think I saw the exact keyboard, already in production / for sale on something like akihabaranews

When I first saw the photo I thought, oooh, a new MacBook Air!

Then I proceeded to laugh my socks off.

No t-shirts? :-(

$200,000 to research, develop, design and manufacture something like that is VERY VERY low.

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