The Wave of the Present: OLED

 

The future is now, kiddies. Its pretty obvious that the gameplay of the Nintendo DS, at least when implemented to its greatest advantages, represents the most intuitive way to experience modern gaming. In sports games, for example, you can pick your play, or get line changes ready without ever leaving your current screen. Even better than that, in real-time strategy games, we can view the map, unit diagrams, artillery and building information, all while having live videos of what your spy units are seeing. But the best, is probably the first person shooters and finally being able to have your entire screen real estate open with all the secondary info, ammo, health, key map, etc. hotkeyed as you see fit.

The ability to entirely reprogram the “keyboard” in a graphical way that suits your needs for each game you play while it is a little far off at this point, though. Artemy Lebedev, the designer of this keyboard already offers a simpler keyboard that still has the same physical and tactile keys of the qwerty keyboards we are used to but each one is, in itself, an OLED display. This is a step in the right direction, but it only allows for limited customization and isn’t really much of a step up from the programmable keypads (you know, the ones where you pop the keys off and write on the white slips underneath) that we’ve had in the past.

That said, you’ve now seen the future. And to me, its finally clear that multitouch monitors aren’t the holy grail, it’s the OLED keyboard that will allow us to truly attain uber-1337 status .