Ryan Seacrest wants to turn your iPhone 5s into a BlackBerry

There’s an old design adage that posits a camel is a horse built by committee. The Typo Keyboard seeks to turn your iPhone 5s into a camel.

Shipping in January, 2014, the Typo Keyboard is a slip case for the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s that features a battery powered, fretted keyboard, seemingly ripped from a BlackBerry smartphone. Typo’s mission statement is to eliminate the two-smartphone need most business professionals face: a QWERTY smartphone for correspondence and an iPhone for “virtually everything else.”

We haven’t had a chance to get our hands on the Typo Keyboard yet to confirm our suspicions, but a quick glance at the screenshots and specs may be enough to verify that trying to do everything leads to doing nothing well. The Typo Keyboard case adds a hefty 1/4 inch in thickness and a whopping 3/4 inch in length, hampering the sleek form factor of the 5/s. The case also covers the iPhone Home button, and while there is a replacement button on the keyboard, there’s no possible way for it to replicate the 5s’ fingerprint scanner, rendering useless one of the device’s best features.

Typo Co. is accepting pre-orders for the case now for $99 USD. The company lists ubiquitous media personality Ryan Seacrest as a principle founder. One wonders if the Typo Keyboard would exist if someone had just shown Seacrest a BlackBerry Q10.

[source]Typo Co[/source]