Tap…Type…something. I received an email from Tap Systems, Inc. this morning. They are releasing their TAP product later this month and will start taking pre-orders soon.

What is TAP. It is a Bluetooth keyboard that fits onto your hand and uses chording to give you access to the entire keyboard with one hand. What is chording? It is the process of using different combinations of fingers to generate different letters, just like creating chords on a piano or guitar. With TAP, you tap a hard surface with certain fingers to create a letter, number, or symbol. They don’t have the actual chords published, but here is an example. Going from your thumb to your pinky, number your finders 1-5. For a common letter, like “e”, you might tap just your index finger (2). For a less common letter, like “m”, you might tap finders 2 and 3 at the same time. On the keyboard I used, the thumb was like a shift key, you would just include your thumb for any character you wanted capitalized.

It sounds complicated, but I’ve used chording keyboards before and they are surprisingly easy to learn and let you type quickly. When I experimented with this before, I liked using a chording keyboard with my left hand and the mouse in my right. When doing data entry it makes the process fast and easy.

Will this particular product work well? I don’t know, but I’d like to try it.

How does it work? They keyboard is a rubber strap with holes for your fingers and thumb. After placing the band on your hand, you can starting taping out chords.

Where can you start tapping out a message, just about anywhere. Their website shows people tapping out messages in bed, on their head, on a bike, and in a meeting room. I don’t know how much of a “tap” is required to register the chord, but it doesn’t look like it’s very much.

At this point, I don’t know anything about pricing, or their planned ship date. You can learn more at http://tapwithus.com/

Seeing this makes me think about Morse code. It seems like it would be fairly easy to build a Bluetooth iambic paddle, a device with a paddle for dashes and a paddle for dots, it could have shift, ctrl, and alt keys to make it easier to use. This would be better for me, as Morse code is a skill I could use for amateur radio. I’ll have to figure this out…

Are you interested in TAP? Talk about it in the comments. Do you know of a Bluetooth keyer? Put that in the comments as well.