News

It's hard for tech companies to pay much attention to design. Why shell out for cutting-edge design when the technology is likely to be outdated six months from now? As a corollary, however, you can be pretty well certain that a technology has reached some level of maturity when its maker starts paying attention to what the product looks like.

A few eye-catching items have crossed my desk recently, and are worth noting not only because their design is great, but because they're also excellent technology.

Matias Folding Keyboard, $69.95; iRizer Stand, $39.95; iFold Stand, $69.95. Matias Complete Mobile Office (keyboard with mouse and iRizer), $139.95, all from Matias.ca.

First are three products from the fertile imagination of a young Toronto designer called Edgar Matias, who has been concentrating on accessories for Apple products. His most recent products, found mostly from Apple resellers, are, however, applicable to any computer.

His Matias Folding Keyboard is precisely that: A full-sized keyboard that folds along a vertical axis, clicks shut and can be carried around by the Compleat Geek. Well, I'm not being entirely fair here: Keyboards are extremely personal things, and if you're travelling, it would be nice to be able to pack one without trouble.

The USB cable that comes with it is not, like most straightforward keyboards, permanently attached and can be carried separately. Moreover, Mathias has added a brilliant if simple touch: He has folded the cable at its half-way point, and wrapped the kink in plastic. This allows users to fold the cable more easily, and the same way each time. It's not much, but it represents some serious creativity.

The keyboard is pretty much standard; it uses a domed-key technology, which offers a nice if soft tactile response, but its keys have also been tweaked. The Fn key has been extended to allow a user to control the cursor keys from the home row; a tab key on the number pad is designed for entering numbers into forms and spread sheets with one hand.

A folding keyboard might be a good idea for those who need it as an accessory to a PC or Mac laptop. But if a user wants to keep plugging the keyboard into different computers, you'd expect it to be able to run on a generic keyboard driver. For this review, the computer handling the keyboard had to be rebooted after the Matias Folding Keyboard was removed to restore the driver to the incumbent keyboard controller.

A more serious problem is that the keyboard does not lock securely in the opened position. Put it on your lap or an uneven surface, and it will easily give along the hinged middle.

Matias is the kind of designer who goes on retreats to design something — he spent four months in Taiwan and China meditating on the challenges presented by a folding keyboard, and about as long on the iFold laptop stand. The iFold is a pretty heavy affair that opens out, Transformer-style, to support a laptop on a table or desk, and is the first real competitor to the iCurve, the unnecessarily expensive and awkward clear-plastic laptop support favoured by Apple stores.

Instead, the iFold collapses into a square and can be more easily packaged in a suitcase. It being metal, it's a little heavy for that kind of portability. But in one of those odd twists of the creative process, Matias shortly after stumbled across another design that is as simple, sleek and light as the iFold is not.

It's called the iRizer, and it's simply two sheets of plastic. You slide the base into one of four carefully crafted slots in the back panel, and it suddenly becomes an adjustable notebook stand. Each slot has been angled; depending on which slot you use, the notebook can be tilted at 20, 30, 40 or 50 degrees, not counting the continuous tilt of the laptop's screen. It's quite thin, incredibly light and brilliantly simple.

Mathias also sells his products bundled. The Portable Office includes the folding keyboard and the iFold stand; the Mobile Office includes the folding keyboard and the iRizer stand. They include a little notebook mouse, unremarkable except for the fact that its USB cable and plug disappear into the body of the mouse.

All of Matias' designs are aimed at serious computing. He has understood one of the fundamental principles of mobility: many of the sacrifices we make in the name of portability are not really optimal (such as notebook keyboards), and we actually need more desk space to handle all the peripheral equipment we have to have to make our notebooks smaller. With his designs, it's possible to do some serious work on laptops in greater comfort.

New Jawbone, from Aliph, $139.99

About 18 months ago, a Bluetooth-headset company called Aliph released a device that not only had great noise-reduction technology, but actually looked terrific. It was created by Yves Béhar, a Swiss-American Silicon Valley industrial hotshot who had worked with Apple, Birkenstock, BMW's MINI, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Nike and others. Most recently, he designed the One Laptop Per Child XO computer.

Aliph called the headset Jawbone, and it was an immediate hit among critics and buyers. But not to rest on its laurels, Aliph has just come out with the New Jawbone, half as small as the original with improved background-noise elimination and better response in windy conditions.

Worn on the ear, the Jawbone looks like a rectangle patterned with elongated diamonds, which is an improvement on so many Bluetooth headsets that sport fake-futuristic designs that should be hood ornaments for cars made in the 1950s. It's not a particularly exciting design, but it's certainly a good one — instead of referring to it as a headset, Aliph is pleased to call it "earwear" ("If it is not beautiful, it does not belong on your face," Mr. Béhar intones on the brochure with typical Gallic finality).

The really impressive stuff is under that diamond-patterned skin, which is available in matte black, silver and rose gold. The concept behind the Jawbone is something called the Voice Activity Sensor, which is a little plastic button that sits against your cheek. The sensor tells the unit what your voice sounds like and the unit then subtracts other sounds — street noise, raucous parties, the neighbours' rambunctious children and so on.

The noise-cancelling technology is called Noise Assassin, developed for military use by Aliph for the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. It is turned on or off by an invisible button toward the back of the unit, covered by the diamond-patterned skin. A similar invisible button, toward the centre of the device, starts the talk function. Unfortunately, things can get a little complicated at this point. To reject a call, you must inexplicably press the Noise Assassin button while the phone is ringing; press the button during a call, and it will cycle through several volume levels, which is equally illogical.

There are some really nice design features. Although it comes with a leather-covered ear loop, it also comes with three other plastic ones, a good idea because a leather loop will inevitably become funky with sweat; there are also three different sizes of latex ear buds to fit differently made ears, and the unit is charged by a wall plug that has a USB port in it.

In fact, the Jawbone is on the brink of being over-designed; it arrives floating in a clear plastic box that looks like a small museum display case, and the instructions are in keeping with all the latest trends in typography, printed in white and blue on black paper. The instructions are printed on a half-metre-long strip of black paper, folded into a dozen panels.

But this kind of creative chutzpah can be forgiven when the product is really worth it. And both the New Jawbone and the Matias products are a happy marriage of design and function.