Making an external keyboard work with an iPhone is nothing new. Many people have hacked their way to the same results. This new video making its rounds on the web is a little different, it shows an iPhone playing nice with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard.
The video simply shows Ralf Ackermann, the creator, slowly typing his way to external Bluetooth keyboard glory. The video oddly doesn’t show the letters as he is typing so we remain skeptical, but who are we to judge?
Ackermann states in his blog entry that this can be done on all jailbroken iPhones, and that it uses a packaged application so “bits and pieces are not exposed to the end-user.” The keyboard works with all applications that use the touchscreen keyboard.
Most users are fairly accustomed to the touchscreen keyboard by now, but imagine how much more work most users could get done with an external keyboard.
Whether or not this is real, it’s not available to the general public. Just let the images sink in and you will at least be able to sleep a little easier tonight knowing someday this will be possible on your iPhone.
[via Engadget]
This is really cool in theory, however there are a few problems with the video. There is no bluetooth icon on the phone, and the veency icon shows an active veency (remote terminal session) to the phone. I could easily make a video doing the exact same thing. I’m not sold until we get more proof here. Looks like a hoax.
I partially agree. Whether or not it is a hoax isn’t my problem. I’m not jailbreaking anything to get something like this to work anyway. Let’s leave feedback ( http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html ) to Apple for these ideas and let them make it happen.
I did some further research… Apparently the developer is piggybacking on the veency service to handle the keyboard injection. So maybe this is more legitimate than first glances imply.