Cellphone keyboard from Reudo

K-Tai Watch brings news of a kind of gadget that seems to be particular to Japan--the external cellphone keyboard. It's perhaps a reflection of the fact that while cellphones here are tremendously advanced, we don't yet have anything equivalent to the PDA phones exemplified by the Treo 600. The Reudo RBK-320 works only with Japanese Vodafone models and costs about Y15,000, which pricing would seem to doom it to very low sales indeed--given that Vodafone's in the midst of a full-on discounting drive to try and hang on to some market share until its first decent 3G handsets come out later this year, that's probably about the same price as most of its current phones.

One interesting thing we find sniffing around the product specs is that DoCoMo's 3G FOMA phones are by design unable to take input from an external keyboard. We wonder whether that's just something that DoCoMo didn't feel was important enough to include in the spec, or whether it's eyeing PDA-style phones for the future. Certainly, it's worth noting that it has specified handset manufacturers must use either Symbian or Linux for phone operating systems, and Sharp, which makes the Linux-powered Zaurus PDAs, is one of those manufacturers.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]