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iPhone Bluetooth Keyboard Hack Looks Very Promising

Ars Technica has posted what looks like an incredibly promising bit of bluetooth iPhone hackery, courtesy of iPhone expert Ralf Ackerman.

What separates this hack from a few keyboard hacks in the past, is that this is a completely internal solution. It shows promising support for what may be a convergence of technologies used for general mobile computing.

“For the external approach, Ackermann modified a Robotech Bluetooth module, which he placed in an iPhone battery sleeve and connected to the iPhone (serial) connector port at the bottom of the unit. This allowed the the phone to communicate directly with the the module using the Bluetooth serial port profile,” Erica Sadun notes for Ars Technica.

The report goes onto explain that without Jay “saurik” Freeman’s Veency application, none of this would be possible. “Ackermann used a tiny libvncclient to generate keyboard events, which were then passed to Veency. Veency then provided the keyboard event injection using the iPhone’s private Graphics Services framework.”

Promising to say the least… Imagine an iPhone with a simple bluetooth keyboard connected to it, coupled with some recent tv-out discoveries and the device could turn into a truly mobile computer. Check out the full report over at Ars or follow Ackerman’s progress on his site as well.