If there’s one feature that we love about the Surface series of tablets from Microsoft, it would be its keyboard covers. Granted they’re not the first keyboard covers ever, but they are surprisingly well-designed and pretty nice to use, if you’ve ever tried them before. That being said, it looks like Microsoft might have something new up their sleeves.
The company’s Applied Sciences division has recently revealed a prototype that they are working on. This is basically a keyboard cover that has a small built-in e-ink display, which you can see in the video above. The keyboard itself is pretty standard, so in reality its the e-ink display that’s really the main feature.
It is a touch-sensitive meaning that you can interact with it. This allows you to create shortcuts to apps that you can touch to launch, so if you don’t want to clutter your desktop or taskbar, this is an alternative. It can also be used to sign documents, navigate websites, or in the case of Photoshop, it can be where the tool palettes sit so that you’ll have quicker access to them, especially if you’re on the go.
Unfortunately like we said, this is only a prototype for now meaning that if you were hoping to buy one, you can’t. There’s really no telling if Microsoft will ever mass produce it, but it looks pretty cool and we wouldn’t mind getting our hands on one – would you?
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