Typo Products Says BlackBerry Can’t Patent Physical Keyboards

Typo Products, the start-up co-founded by media personality Ryan Seacrest, has told a US court that BlackBerry’s shouldn’t hold a patent for its iconic QWERTY smartphone keyboard.

BlackBerry, which owns 44,000 patents, sued the company in January, claiming that its Typo Keyboard Case accessory for the iPhone 5 and 5S infringes its intellectual property. In response, Typo asked the judge to declare these claims unenforceable, saying that similar designs were on sale as far back as 1988 – a decade before BlackBerry first filed its patents.

Earlier this year, BlackBerry’s recently appointed CEO John Chen reportedly suggested that the majority of the company’s future handsets will feature a physical keyboard as part of its plan to target business customers.

Keyboard wars

Typo Products, headquartered in Los Angeles, has designed a case to slip over an iPhone and offer 37 angled, illuminated keys in a standard QWERTY layout. The case includes a 180 mAh battery charged via USB, and connects to a smartphone using Bluetooth. The accessory costs just $99 (£60). However, due to the physical limitations of the keyboard, its users are unable to access Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner.

Meanwhile BlackBerry developed its original QWERTY keyboard for the BlackBerry 850 pager back in 1999, naming it so due to the resemblance of the keys to the drupelets of the blackberry fruit. Countless BlackBerry users have called the physical keyboard one of the main reasons they remain with the brand – the addictive process of punching the tiny keys even earned company the nickname ‘Crackberry’.

After discovering that Typo enabled a similar experience on iPhones, the Canadian company filed a lawsuit. Reuters reports that rather than dropping the product and minimising its losses, Typo Products went on the offensive. It says BlackBerry keyboards don’t comply with legal requirements for patentability, and has asked the court to dismiss the claims and not authorise any further action.

At a time when BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) – one of the unique selling points of this struggling ecosystem – has gone cross-platform, physical keyboard remain the main differentiator for BlackBerry, and the company is likely to fight to keep it that way.

Over the last three years, BlackBerry transformed from a dominant force in the telecommunications market into a niche player whose future is uncertain. It recently reported quarterly losses of around £2.7 billion – but its share price actually went up following the news, thanks to the appointment of the new CEO, support of the private investors and a feasible turnaround plan.

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