Smartphone Expansion Keyboard

The first keyboard to combine HDMI output + charging + USB Expansion for smartphones into ONE device

Smartphone 2.0 is upon us!

Having been an Electrical Engineer, the Office IT Guy, an Executive, and a Business Owner; I am always surrounded by computers, sometimes using a Windows PC, a Mac, a tablet, and Smartphone all at the same time. I have waited 20 years for phones to be powerful enough to replace the brick and a laptop that I always had to carry around. Yes, I remember you all my trusted sidekicks: Winbook with a Pentium Chip, Dell C-400, 13 Inch Macbook Pro, and 13 Inch Macbook Air! Now, I can do everything using my Smartphone with the added help of my latest invention. 

Introducing SEK (the Smartphone Expansion Keyboard). The SEK is designed for use with the latest Smartphone with USB Type C interface as a charging, HDMI output enabling, USB Device expansion dock. 

Functions:

• Connect the SEK to a monitor via HDMI cable, your Smartphone immediately turns into a typing machine. 
• Connect a USB mouse to the SEK and control your phone like a regular computer. 
• With a Type-C Power Delivery Specification compatible Input port, simply Connect the Power adapter from your mobile phone, the SEK is also a charging station. 
• The USB Expansion port is full USB 3.1 compatible, which means you can also Connect any OTG or USB 3.0 compatible device such as flash drive, portable drive to backup your phone.

By the way, this entire campaign on Kickstarter is written one my Huawei Mate 10 using the SEK. From the write up, subscribing the project, even the video posted was edited with smartphone + SEK.

Benefits: 

• Work more conveniently than a heavy laptop when outside or away from your desk - Replace one computer at home or in the office 
• Consolidate your computing devices 
• No more file transfer between phone, computers, or cloud. All files is in the phone and processed with the phone 
• The financial benefits of the SEK is also tremendous. Imagine the money saved on a desktop or laptop. You save USD$400-900 on laptop or desktop that you use mostly for emails and surfing the web anyway. Take that $400 and spend it on the SEK, and upgrade on your phone, treat yourself to a nice dinner and still have money left. Double that saving by getting one for your home and one for your office and save at least $800.  Cloud service can be a subscription cost, centralising all computing with a higher end smartphone can also possibly reduce the need for secondary mobile devices such as tablets etc.)

Risks and challenges

The biggest challenge has always been waiting for the technologies to catch up with the idea. There were previous attempts to use Smartphones as computers with MHL or screen mirroring technologies, but both had a problem with delays, which makes it really frustrating when trying to type fast. Any typo will not show until half a seconds later after several more keys have been hit and had to use the back arrow to go back and edit. The faster you type, the slower you get with the corrections because you have to go back further. The SEK's connection to the monitor is via HDMI, which is real time display without delay.

Type-C interface, which is USB 3.1 Specification was only recently introduced. It has built in digital video output for up to 4K resolution. Even with the newly released USB Spec, the industry took a year before any full video output compatibile phone was shipped. So the biggest challenge or agony I should say is to have the idea but never had the supported technology.