Remember Typo, the company co-founded by entertainer and tech luminary Ryan Seacrest that began selling a suspiciously BlackBerry-like keyboard case for the iPhone earlier this year? Typo is back with a new iteration called the Typo 2, which takes the same idea and implements it in a way that hopefully won't make a certain Canadian smartphone manufacturer feel litigious.
The original Typo keyboard looked so much like BlackBerry's that BlackBerry sued in January, and by March it had won a preliminary injunction banning Typo from selling the accessory. Looking at the original Typo keyboard, it's not hard to see why:
And here's the keyboard BlackBerry is using on its Q10 smartphone.
The first Typo's "inspiration" is obvious—the keyboard swipes everything from the shape and layout of the keys to BlackBerry's signature keyboard frets. Typo added a couple of iPhone-specific keys, but if you were shown pictures of the two keyboards side by side with no context, it would be hard to tell which was which. Even the shape imprinted on the spacebar key is the same.
The Typo 2 keyboard is still admittedly pretty reminiscent of a BlackBerry keyboard, but the shape of the keys has been changed, the layout has been shuffled a little more, and the telltale frets have been removed. One can sense Typo's lawyers behind most of these changes. Now all the Typo 2 has to do is address the numerous other issues reviewers had with the original, including a creaky frame and loose keys (it also covers your Home button, a problem if you have an iPhone 5S and want to use TouchID).
The Typo 2 is available for preorder now and will ship in mid-September. The "About Us" page on the Typo 2's site doesn't mention the original Typo, sweeping it and its associated legal problems under the rug.
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