Apple Bluetooth Keyboard used with the iPhone

By on Wednesday 25th February 2009 11:36 am in Gadgets, iPhone, Mods

bluetooth iPhone Keyboard

Check out this cool hack that uses an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard with the iPhone.

bluetooth iPhone Keyboard

The hack was made by Ubiq, and the Bluetooth keyboard can be used to type emails, texts, web browsing etc, it uses a jailbroken iPhone, here’s a video of it in action.

Ubiqkom via GadgetLite

3 Comments »

What do you think?

  • http://kirkaugustine.net kirk

    Can’t believe bloggers keep falling for this. There is obviously a VNC icon in the upper right corner next to the battery icon. The bluetooth keyboard is connected to a computer that is running VNC.

  • Dissy

    Actually that is how you get this whole thing working. I too was working on a bluetooth game pad that uses the same software method as this person.

    A program runs that talks to the keyboard, since the iphone itself does not have the right stuff in its bluetooth stack.
    That program also opens a VNC connection as a client, to the VNC server you see running on the phone (Which is installed via cydia)

    As the keyboard sends say the letter ‘A’, the program interprets this and sends a ‘A’ keycode, just like any VNC client can.

    In my case, i wanted to map each joypad action (up down A B start etc) to ‘taps’ on the screen. My interpreter app did the same thing with my hardware, then sent ‘mouse’ events to the local VNC server.

    Until Apple adds keyboard support to their own bluetooth stack, this is the only way to do it.

  • Dissy

    I should probably have specified that the interpreter program is not running on another computer. It runs on the iPhone itself.
    When jailbroken, you can run background apps. The interpreter app running on the iphone is what connects to ‘localhost’ to the VNC server.

    Sending VNC events is much much easier than injecting into the normal event loop, something that almost requires a C# program to do, and i’m not even sure there is an API for that sort of thing, since normal iPhone apps are supposed to be the only program running.

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