Hacked iPhone works with Bluetooth Keyboard

November 2009

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If you are a long time iPhone user who is used to its virtual keyboard, you might find the need of a physical keyboard unnecessary.

However, some folks insist that its one of deal breakers. We have already seen the iPhone hacked by wiring it up to a genuine physical keyboard.

iPhone expert Ralf Ackermann has used an external bluetooth approach and has succeeded in supporting a standard bluetooth keyboard and as per Erica Sadun of Ars Technica he is working on supporting an internal one.

When we had compared Apple's iPhone 3G with the so-called iPhone killer T-Mobile's G1 we had mentioned that one of the advantages of G1 over iPhone 3G was that it had a full QWERTY physical keyboard. However, as I have mentioned earlier, once you get used to iPhone's virtual keyboard, the need of a physical keyboard seems unnecessary.

Ralf Ackermann has used an external bluetooth approach and has succeeded in supporting a standard bluetooth keyboard.

Erica explains:

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.

The whole thing works courtesy of Jay "saurik" Freeman's Veency application. 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.

Ackermann is also working on a project called Bluesn0w which is completely internal solution. You might have observed that the name of the project is inspired by iPhone Dev team's recently released yellowsn0w application to unlock iPhone 3G.

Erica points out:

Allowing the iPhone to accept keyboard input from an external Bluetooth keyboard will move the iPhone forward in opening new opportunities for general computing and on-the-go note taking.

What do you think?

[via Ars Technica]

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