Optimus Maximus Coming Our Way

Remember Optimus Maximus? The thing that made lots of people drool and watch their keyboard turn red of shame? The keyboard that got sold out in pre-order phase? As X-bit Labs discovered, Optimus attended a live demo in Moscow, a demo where everyone had a chance to touch it and press a button or two. Actually, the piece of hardware the people had the chance to play with wasn't a fully operating version of the highly touted peripheral because, as Art Lebedev have declared, the keyboard hasn't yet reached the status of final and ready to be released product.

According to Artemy Lebedev, the man behind the magic occurring on the Lebedev design studio premises, "an Optimus Maximus working prototype was shown to the crowd. Everyone had a chance to press any key. Each of the displays was showing a picture of a dog".

Each of the keyboard's 113 keys are equipped with a standalone 65336-color OLED capable of displaying a 10.1x10.1 mm image at a resolution of 48x48 pixels and using a 160 degrees viewing angle. If you think this sounds good, the fact that Optimus Maximus is also able to display (on each of its keys) videos running at 10fps might actually knock you out.

The keyboard can easily use different layouts (in the attached image you can see it displaying a normal English layout and below a Photoshop one) and it's easily connectable to a Windows or Mac OS X operating system via an USB 2.0 connection. Besides the fact that this is one of the few (if not the only) keyboards that ask you to have at least 256 of RAM to be able to use it, the price of 1564$ (1256 euros) will surely also make it a keyboard really hard to come by in the home of the average Joe.

If Art Lebedev keep their promise, you will be able to get your hands on it (if you have of course already bought one of the 200 keyboards sold during the pre-orders that took place in May) at the end of November this year. 600 more units will be delivered to their lucky (and most probably rich) owners in December and January.