Glyn Evans of Pocket PC Solutions just contacted me with some photos of a concept keyboard he is using from Eleksen who pioneered the fabric keyboard design. This concept keyboard is interesting as it doubles as a case for the UMPC, in Glyn’s case a TabletKiosk eo. According to Glyn this keyboard gives an audible click when a key is pressed and is very usable on a daily basis. Here are a couple of photos of the concept keyboard, the first showing the eo nestled in the case part of the keyboard and the second showing the keyboard deployed for use.

Everybody in the entire world has been looking disgustedly down at their current keyboards since seeing the Optimus, with its hundreds of keys that are also LED screens, each one of which can be customized to display different things and perform different functions, depending on the program or the operating system. Well, do we even have to tell you that today's top link refers to a rollout date for the Optimus? Can you even contain the unbridled, childlike excitement bubbling up inside you at the prospect of owning such a keyboard?

Shark is an advanced pen-based shorthand method that allows users to input words into mobile devices by tracing them letter by letter on a virtual keyboard. Instead of tapping independently on four virtual keys with a stylus to spell "word," for example, consumers would put the stylus on "w" and then carve a continuous trail all the way to "d."
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Users initially hunt for letters to write words, but the idea is that they fairly rapidly start to memorize the shape of common words and word components--and therefore, their dependence on visual guidance decreases. The computer assesses the user's final pattern, interprets it as a word from its database and turns it into text on the screen.