Minuum Keyboard Review

[G+_Brandon Giesing / CosiC]

Minuum Keyboard Review

Out of all the Crowd-Funding Campaigns, has there been one more popular than Minuum? It was unique and they fulfilled their promises well. So I thought that I would take a look at this keyboard as they release their first major update.

 

So what is Minuum? Well it is basically the keyboard you know smashed down into one dimension or row. The reason I say the one you know instead of the QWERTY is because with the latest update you can also use QWERTZ, AZERTY, and Alphabetical. There is one noticeably absent from there, and that is DVORAK. Hopefully they will add that at a later time.

 

How do you use the keyboard? Well, it all relies on your muscle memory. You type in the same places you do on a normal keyboard but just in one row! Other than that, there are some other tricks to this keyboard. Spacing is done via a flick to the right. A second time will give you common punctuation. A flick to the left will delete the last word, if you want to delete a character press the delete button instead. To enter, flick to the top-right and to voice type, flick to the top-left! Finally, switch between symbols and letters mode.

 

There is one more gesture and that is a press with two fingers. This is a new gesture with the latest update. Before if you wanted to type a password or obscure name you had to press and hold on the keyboard to type and add it to the dictionary. You can still do that but now you can get a normal Full keyboard by doing that gesture and quickly type your obscure word then switch back to the small keyboard! It makes it so much easier than it was and the full keyboard adopts the layout that you selected in the settings.

 

Speaking of settings, this keyboard does include a launcher icon to open settings and setup the keyboard. First time you launch it you will have to accept a privacy policy then it will kick into a setup process. At the end of the process there is a tutorial called the Minuum Guide. Now, the main settings are basically keyboard layout and size. You can choose from the layouts I listed above and change the size of every aspect of the keyboard. Lastly, there is also the option to add a space bar and disable gestures.

 

Overall, this is a really great keyboard; however, you can't download it yet as it is only available to backers of the Crowd-Funding campaign.