If you’ll excuse the pun, it looks like Ryan Seacrest’s Typo for iPhone has made a good case for BlackBerry to sue the designers. The latest is that the latter has filed a lawsuit against the company co-founded by the aforesaid American TV personality. This falls at a very inconvenient time for the Typo keyboard add-on which is set to make its debut at the upcoming CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2014 that will kick off in the coming week.
To make it worse, the keyboard case was already put up for pre-ordering in early December with a shipping date set for this month. What’s so special about the accessory? Well, if you’re an iPhone user who’s always wanted the additional convenience of one of those awesomely ergonomic BlackBerry keypads, then Typo is probably a dream come true. You can slide the Apple smartphone into the cover, hook it up via Bluetooth and start tapping away with ease.
It costs $99, if you still want to bother ordering it and hoping the lawsuit in question won’t give much trouble. The QWERTY keyboard looks solid and all of the buttons excluding the space bar have a slight curve breaking the otherwise flat pattern. Now where have we seen that before? That’s right, on several BlackBerry handsets. With the accessory on, the iPhone’s lower half seems to be made up of a BlackBerry device.
Don’t get it wrong; BlackBerry’s beef with the makers of the Typo have less to do with the fact that it’s allegedly a violation of its intellectual property rights and more to do with the lack of ‘credit’ for borrowing the distinctive style. As the company puts it, “We are flattered by the desire to graft our keyboard onto other smartphones, but we will not tolerate such activity without fair compensation.”
But Seacrest and Co. seems to think this claim ‘lacks merit’ and plans to fight it out in court. Not a very good start for the Typo, we think. In fact, it may have stopped many folks from booking the keypad case and risking a bother with refunds and such.