Ryan Seacrest invested $1 million to transform your iPhone into a BlackBerry

Ryan Seacrest — the brilliant mind behind reality-television peddler Ryan Seacrest Productions, which is responsible for innovative programming such as Kourtney & Kim Take New York and Kourtney & Kim Take Miami — knows an opportunity when he sees it.

With BlackBerry imploding like the core of a dying star, the budding technologist thought: Why not combine the physical comfort of a BlackBerry keyboard with the easy-to-use software of an iPhone?

After two years of development and a $1 million initial investment, the result is this: The Typo iPhone Keyboard, a $99 peripheral for the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5S that doubles as a case. It effectively transforms your iPhone into a BlackBerry, and is in many ways the inverse of the wishes expressed by President Obama yesterday. It arrives in January and is now available for pre-order.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Indeed, there is a market for smartphone users who would prefer the tactile sensation of a physical keyboard but would still like to iMessage their friends emojis. While the Typo iPhone Keyboard wouldn't be the first to attempt to shade that Venn diagram, it does look, well, interesting, and promises other niceties like 40 percent more screen real estate.

Here's how the eureka moment came about, according to the press release:

What's less clear is how users will access the iPhone 5S's Home button and fingerprint sensor therein now that it's covered by the keyboard, which is an odd oversight after two years of research. In the interim, it may be wise to keep that second phone around after all.