Email article
CES 2014 in Las Vegas has officially kicked off, opening the floodgates to seemingly countless new products and new ideas. One of these new ideas is the TrewGrip mobile QWERTY. Its a keyboard that’s meant to be used with your smartphone or small tablet, but it flips the conventional design of keyboards. Literally.
Instead of placing the keyboard on top, below or on the sides of your device, the TrewGrip actually makes you type on a keyboard that sits behind your device. It’s a QWERTY layout, yet laid out in such a way that your fingers rest where they normally would despite being sideways. It’s supposed to make you use the same muscle memory, but holding it in this new and awkward manner might make that difficult.
TrewGrip CEO Mark Parker even likens learning how to type on it like typing on an accordion, and company representatives have pegged the learning time to 8-10 hours. It looks and sounds ridiculous. And with a planned price point of around $250 when it ships later this year, the whole package might seem like a bad idea. But when you consider the focus of TrewGrip, which Parker says is the healthcare industry, it makes a little more sense. “They hate the concept of having to hunt and peck on a tablet or sit in the corner. They want to maintain eye contact with the patient,” Parker tells The Verge.
That’s a new idea I can get behind.
