Think Outside Inc., creator of the award winning Stowaway Portable Keyboards for handheld devices, yesterday announced they are the first to offer enhanced keyboard driver support for devices running Microsoft's Windows Mobile 5.0.

With the new Windows Mobile 5.0 compatible driver, you can continue to use your Stowaway Universal Keyboard (see my review here) and Bluetooth Mouse (see my review here) with the lately released Windows Mobile 5.0 devices such as HTC Universal or Wizard:

"The Stowaway Universal Bluetooth Keyboard is the best selling portable Bluetooth keyboard in the world, with support for over 500 mobile devices and seven different languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Korean and Japanese," said Greg van den Dries, CEO and president of Think Outside. "Windows Mobile devices have proven to be popular among our customers due to their superior email and productivity capabilities, and we have seen a ten-fold increase in our customer base using these products. By fully supporting Windows Mobile 2005, we continue to offer our customers the best possible compatibility in the industry."

The new Stowaway Universal Bluetooth Keyboard and driver offer several unique and revolutionary features, including:

• Ability to use our new Stowaway Bluetooth Travel mouse in conjunction with a Stowaway keyboard, which provides the mobile professional a revolutionary way to navigate and enter text on many Windows Mobile powered devices
• Digitally signed driver to meet the security requirements implemented in Windows Mobile 2005
• A new shortcut utility that allows international users to easily find key combinations that produce alternate characters and symbols

"Mobile phones today are being used for services that are much more advanced than simple voice communication," said John Dietz, group manager for Microsoft. "Windows Mobile 5.0 enables our industry partners to develop exciting new hardware designs and solutions that will revolutionize how customers use mobile devices. Think Outside's keyboards and mice are widely recognized as one of the best productivity tools for mobile professionals and we're pleased to see them actively support the Windows Mobile platform."

While Windows Mobile 5.0 supports parts of the Bluetooth HID (Human Interface Device) profile, it only supports Bluetooth keyboards but not the mouse profile. And for the keyboard, it supports the keyboard layout of the device language only, which means you can not use a - let's say - German keyboard with an English Pocket PC (see my preview here)
Therefore, the new Think Outside driver with multi-language support plus mouse support is highly appreciated.

The Stowaway Universal Bluetooth Keyboard supports a wide variety of Bluetooth enabled Devices from leading companies including Samsung, Motorola, Qtek, Nokia, Orange, O2, Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, Eurotel, T-Mobile, Vodaphone, Siemens, HTC and Sony Ericsson. The keyboard also supports Bluetooth-enabled Pocket PC PDAs from Dell and others, as well as traditional Macintosh and Windows XP-based desktop and notebook computers with integrated Bluetooth technology.

Cheers ~ Arne