Fabric keyboards
Posted May 4, 2005
When I (briefly) had a MIThril 2000 system up and running, I found that it was very useful to have both a Twiddler for on-the-go use and a compact traditional keyboard for serious note-taking when stationary. In my case, I used the nice Palm/Stowaway folding keyboard with the Quenya driver to automatically switch between them, which worked okay, but the wired connection was sometimes awkward since the cables necessarily extended away from the body.
This link mentions a Bluetooth version of the Eleksen fabric rollable keyboard. It should be available in early summer and hopefully ought to be much more widely compatible across devices than past versions relying on specific cradle connections to PDAs and phones.
If you can't wait, I'll also note that the older, wired Logitech fabric keyboard for Palms is still available for a song from discount stores. I haven't looked at it in detail, and you may have some driver/cradle issues using it out of the box with newer Palms, but the communications protocol is almost certainly some trivial RS232 interface, so it should be pretty easy to hack by interested folks. The Quenya driver is probably a good starting point for Linux development.