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Reviews

Optimus Mini-Three

By Alex Petraglia on Friday, September 22, 2006 at 12:00 AM EST  

Optimus Mini-Three
We’ve been eagerly following the epic saga of the Optimus line of keyboards long before they had gained cult status in the tech community. Even the most vocal of the early critics were floored by the inventive design of putting OLED displays on a keyboard for maximum customization potential. Yet many worried that the Optimus was merely vaporware, or worse, an elaborate scam.

We’re here to safely report that the good folks at Art Lebedev, the Russian design studio behind the Optimus, are indeed releasing an actual product (or two or three) to market that’s both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Thanks to an extended hands-on period with the first entry, the Optimus Mini-Three, we can now fully appreciate what the team is trying to accomplish.

The Mini-Three arrived in a small, unassuming white box, replete with a single page instructional booklet. You’ll need to go the website to download the configuration software, because no discs are provided.

The unit itself is of a high quality plastic and is available in either gray or black. Rubber feet on the base keep the Mini from sliding. The unit can be placed in any direction and the direction in which the buttons point can be easily adjusted using the configurator. It’s about the thickness of a pack of playing cards, the length of a mouse, and the width of a typical cell phone.

Most importantly: the buttons. The surfaces are hard plastic and fairly scratch resistant, from what we gather. Their look is deceiving, however. Instead of producing a satisfying click, similar to hitting the spacebar rather forcefully, the buttons kinda squish, not unlike the feeling one gets when typing on those Flexboard rubber keyboards. We found this to be a major disappointment and hope the full sized Optimus uses keys that “feel” more like a regular keyboard.

Each button is about an inch and a quarter square, with a resolution of 96×96 pixels. The number of colors supported is impressive, as is the viewing angle, but at the brightess setting, the Mini doesn’t bask the room in a beautiful OLED glow like we had expected. The 3 frames per second animation is also a bit of a let-down; it gets the job done, but don’t expect anything near fluid motion.

Creating button schemes is a fairly straightforward process. Design the button images in your favorite graphics editor (or use any that might be online or on your computer: the software will automatically scale any image down to fit the display). Import it into the program, create a new layout scheme, and bind shortcuts or commands to each button. An animated GIF, however, will not run as might be anticipated. Indeed, if the user does want to add any sort of animation to his layout, he’ll need to design and program it himself.

You’ll need to keep the configurator running in the background if you want to continue using the Mini three. Fortunately, it doesn’t consume that much of your PC’s system resources. Unfortunately, the software is extremely buggy, often crashing or displaying incorrect images or no images at all.

We ultimately have very mixed feelings about the Optimus Mini. While it’s definitely a very positive thing that Art Lebedev has delivered on the product it set out to make, we’re left wondering how useful the Mini three is in and of itself. While it’s nice to have those shortcut buttons at fingers length, we don’t feel like they’re particularly useful when it comes to saving time or effort.

If there’s anything that we hope to take with us from here, it’s the hopefulness that the team uses both the feedback and capital provided by the Mini three’s users to fully actualize the full Optimus later this year.

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