By Paul Miller
You know, traditionally we try to be thankful for stuff like slim device profiles and innovative touch UIs, particularly with Thanksgiving coming up soon, but every once in a while we shake a fist against the aesthetics of our time and wish for an alternate history that had rerouted us to a 2010 full of IBM-built keyboards and buttons galore. AlphaUi's Back-Type, which has been making the rounds for a couple weeks, is just such a technology, with 24 anachronistically tactile keys on the back designed for a bit of blind typing that engages eight fingers instead of the typical two thumbs. It's not an entirely new idea, Grippity's been talking about rear mounted keys for a while, and Microsoft Research just put out a clunker of a prototype, but AlphaUi's version seems the most mature and usable. Right now the keyboard is being demoed on the rear of 7-inch Archos tablets, but AlphaUi will be showing off the tech at CES and probably courting a hardware partner if they haven't found one already. Check out a video of the tech after the break.
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