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Comment by aa0 | Hacker News Reader

This isn't SurfaceReviews.com

Fair enough, I got carried away, but custom keyboards will not suddenly make this a good device. I got caught up in ranting about it, because it looks and feels so cool, but is so infuriating to use. What I was hoping to get across is that adding these to the surface don't make it any more practical, and don't address the existing problems with the surface and its keyboard. Without the Surface, this is nothing new (custom input devices are common).

More about the article:

One of the best parts of touch based interfaces is they can change with context and can be customized/improved/fixed for the cost of changing the software. No need to ship a physical 2.0 for your POS when you want to change the button layout.

Also, with these blades, are you expected to carry around more than one and swap them out based on the activity? Then use the onscreen keyboard when you need to do any text input?

The thing is a computer. It has a USB port. One can attach whatever input devices they want. The only difference about a blade is that this doubles as a screen cover. In the medical and fast food examples he gives, the machines are stationary (and you probably want them to stay that way).

I'm all for dedicated input devices or customized interfaces to make jobs easier, but that's hardly a new idea.

You might be looking at it the wrong way. From what I can gander, these blades are going to be for application-specific use. I can see a double-folding math-character keyboard for Mathematica or design-tool for Photoshop being quite useful. Yes, this whole thing is novel, but as we've seen with the iPhone-era, novel gidgets and quirkets make people go bananas. Nothing new, yes, but still a cool thing if executed right. The big difference that people aren't getting here, is that touchscreen UIs take away screen real estate and are limited in size, these covers can be double or triple-folding and can have all kinds of LED-driven knobs, sliders, and whatnot.

I do like to see people trying new things, and agree that people love useless gadgets (myself included). I didn't notice the idea of double folding versions, but it definitely makes sense for mathematica and photoshop, you need the standard alphanumeric keys pretty often, and the keyboard is about as cramped as you woudld want it to be already, so they would need to be bigger to really offer extra utility.

I think they could have generated more interest and more money just selling them with more designs and sports team branding (The Surface is already used by the NFL, so some sort of relationship between them and MS already exists).

As for the knobs and sliders, I agree it would look 'cool' to see real LEDs light up for your fader or the active loops on your sequencer or whatever, but the reason actual musicians like physical knobs and sliders is because of the tactile response they provide. Thats why Serato's vynil controllers are still popular with a lot of people (http://serato.com/controlvinyl). With a touch keyboard like the one that the surface has you get the worst of both worlds. The (lack of) flexibilty of a hardware device and the (lack of) tactile response of a touchscreen.

Hm right, bidirectional input/output for lightshows and whatnot. We have to be careful not to tread into full peripheral territory - because the whole point of these things is to be covers as well? I guess we'll just have to see what M$ offers and hope it's innovative. Because I have no reason to buy yet another tablet unless there truly is something that makes me excited.

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