Somebody promised to buy me one of these if they were ever actually produced. At $1,500, I don’t think my gift is coming anytime soon. This keyboard seems now like one of those ideas that is clever but doesn’t go far enough. If you’re going to put led screens on the keys, why have individual keys at all? Why not have just one big touch screen, or one big LED array which detects finger motion? Then you could have any key layout, or scale the entire thing for the size of your hands and the width of your shoulders, or rearrange the keys into a grid or offset individual columns for the different spans of your different fingers, or switch to a one-handed layout, or switch to a chording style keyboard, or anything else. Why stick to the traditional physical key layout when you are going to all the trouble of making the keys themselves totally configurable?

Update 2008-01-09: Ars Technica reviews the Optimus.