I had a brain flash a bit back that while the Tungsten TX is a pretty good device (great screen, wifi, lots of memory), it falls down when you go to type something. Even entering in the kind of mixed case with special symbols passwords I tend to use is a real pain. Half the time I have to go look up how to draw an ampersand or semicolon again. So I decided that my gadget clutch was in need of yet one more item: a wireless keyboard for the phone. While the Laser virtual holographic keyboard is pretty cool, I'm too cheap to spend $200 on it. The next step down is bluetooth, so I went hunting.
After skipping past some desktop keyboards, I came across a couple candidates. Eleksen makes this cool cloth keyboard that you can roll up, but I couldn't actually find anybody selling it. That narrowed it down to the ThinkOutside Stowaway and the FreedomInput portable keyboard. The first one showed a list price of $150 and the second $100. Still too much, so go hit Froogle and see how much improvement we can get. Didn't do much for FreedomInput, just knocked a few bucks off, but ThinkOutside was down to about the same price $90 on some commerce sites. Then I hit the ebay listers.
Over on ebay there were a number of listings in the $70s and $80s but as I dug through them I ran across one or two that weren't seeing the extreme bid-up the others were. Of course their descriptions were like: USED ITEM, UNTESTED, MAY NOT FULLY WORK, SOLD AS IS. So the question is, do you feel lucky? For $20 I decided to take a spin. And the result? Winner! Works just fine. Ok so the little plastic tray that is supposed to hold up the phone is completely missing, and it came with absolutely no documentation (but in this day and age you're only a google away from the online manual where you can learn the secret ctrl-green alt-blue alt handshake to turn the unit on); but its already exceeded my expectations by working at all, so I'm happy.
