Typing With Your Thumbs

Why does seemingly every home theater PC keyboard look like this one?

I’ve been thinking a lot about handheld keyboards lately—why then ended up the way that the did. Why are they so mushy? Why do they look vaguely like Sega Saturn knockoffs? And rather than letting my niche focus dominate my brain, I’ve decided to share my thoughts with all of you.

You might be wondering, “Ernie, this seems like an incredibly niche topic, even for you.” And the reason I feel the need to talk about this comes down to what I would describe as a gradual decline in the home theater PC keyboard market. For better or for worse, few brands are bringing any innovation to this space.

All vaguely look like game controllers. Many use mushy, rubbery keys with little in the way of click. All have tiny touchpads. And often you can get one of these fairy small keyboards for $25—or less. If you do a quick search on Amazon for a home theater PC keyboard, you’re going to see a lot of devices that look like the one above.

Ultimately, I could pin the market on two specific Chinese companies—iPazzPort and Rii. Each leaned into their specific shape around 2010 or so, with Rii’s early keyboards looking surprisingly like the models that many brands sell today. Interestingly, iPazzPort’s first keyboard was a single-hand wonder, with a full QWERTY keyboard and a tiny trackpad accessible by every finger.

Rii, whose full name is Shenzhen Riitek Technology Co., Ltd., has patented the ornamental designs of its keyboards, but there isn’t really a lot about the company’s choice to design these keyboards this way, but one must assume that it was a natural direction to take keyboards.

But we can see hints in its patent citations, the earliest of which is for a full-sized keyboard made by Slitek with a similarly sloped design. That keyboard, similar to a Compaq design also cited, was sold in the ’90s as the LiteOn SK-7100 Airboard keyboard. Also cited: The Game Boy Advance, which kind of gives the game away.

“What if we combined a wireless keyboard with a portable video game console” isn’t high art, but someone was bound to put two and two together. The result is living rooms have gradually been overtaken by cheap, controller-like keyboards that are just “good enough,” rather than paragons of human interface design. One presumes that if Jony Ive was asked to build a keyboard like this, he might go in another direction.

Despite the utilitarian design, the various Rii keyboards have become popular in enthusiast projects because their small size fits into tight corners. One particularly crazy example I spotted was on Etsy, where someone was selling print files for 3D-printed brackets to use with the Legion Go’s controllers—oh, and a Rii mini keyboard.

iPazzPort and Rii, which both describe themselves as innovators in this ultra-niche space, are making keyboards left and right. Odds are, if you use an Android TV or an Nvidia Shield, you’ve found yourself using one of their products. If you want a physical keyboard that you can use when, say, you’re laying down and surfing with a remote, these are basically the only real options.

In a way, it makes sense that companies like these would emerge when they did. At the time, phone keyboards (a.k.a. thumb boards) were on their way out, and presumably factories with expertise had to figure out another market for this very specific skill set.

I did a lot of looking—on eBay, on Temu, on Amazon, and everywhere else—to see if someone was doing something interesting with these keyboards. The closest I got is this:

This device, the Winmax B1 Pro, is a thumb keyboard in the vein of BlackBerry, except for your living room. But check that key layout. It’s all over the place, a bad impression of a BlackBerry keyboard layout. It makes one wonder whether they would have been better off with putting arrow keys on the thing at all. Plus, rather than using a trackpad anywhere, it’s an air mouse, which means it uses a gyroscope. That is an awkward experience for most people.

That’s the problem with trying something new. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you risk failure in a big way.

Why the home theater PC keyboard market ended up this way

If you wanted to find a symbol of the failures of computing in the living room, you could probably do no better than the GameCube ASCII Keyboard Controller, a wide-boy keyboard with Gamecube controls on either side. That wasn’t going to be good enough for the living room, especially as our game consoles started to require more interactivity from us.

But the potential for something better was certainly out there. In the early ’90s, consoles like the 3DO and Philips CD-i attempted to expand the audience for computing-capable living room devices beyond gamers. But their technology came with compromises. The CD-i used an infrared remote control, and though it eventually offered a wired keyboard, people were initially forced to use a kludgy virtual keyboard which very much did not do the trick.

The Gateway 2000 Destination PC was an awkward product, but by choosing to use RF signals for its keyboard and remote mouse rather than the more common infrared, it was ahead of the curve on one key computing element.

The WebTV, with its infrared keyboard, was perhaps at the vanguard of living room computing in the late ’90s, but it wasn’t the boldest or best-suited example. One could instead point to what Gateway 2000 was doing instead with its multimedia monstrosity, the Destination, a computer that came with a 31-inch monitor. That monitor, which most assuredly raised the price of the computer into the mid-four-figures, topped out at 640x480, later getting upgraded to an 800x600 resolution—mediocre for a 1995-era computer monitor, but downright impressive for a TV replacement.

The company tried selling it as a presentation system and a living room computer. It came with a keyboard and remote-control-style mouse that used radio frequency signals instead of infrared, which ultimately made the device more flexible. You could sit at your couch and surf the Web in a reasonable resolution—as long as you were willing to get a behemoth of a monitor into your living room first.

Obviously, Gateway never found its Destination. But companies did lean harder into the whole home theater thing in part because Microsoft started putting an emphasis on it. Starting with Windows XP and ending during the Windows 8 era, Microsoft tried selling consumers on Windows Media Center, which is effectively what Plex and Jellyfin ultimately became, albeit with some era-appropriate tech, such as CableCARD and DVR support.

The problem was, and is, that home theater PCs are the domain of the nerd—because unlike the Gateway Dimension, most people built them on their own. As Sydney Butler put it for How-To Geek last year:

Even at their peak, HTPCs were a truly niche type of computer. All computers were expensive, and having one dedicated to your home entertainment setup meant you had the spare cash to afford such a luxury. Alternatively, it meant you were a dirt-poor student with just one computer that acted as your TV, Hi-Fi, and DVR. Either way, the shelves of stores were not stocked with HTPCs. Instead, DVD players, and even DVD/VHS combo systems, or DVD-recordable machines, and DVR systems with internal hard drives all offered cheaper and more user-friendly alternatives.

Perhaps sensing that it missed the mainstream with its play, Microsoft gave up on it, putting its eggs into the Xbox One basket instead (and failing miserably). You might argue that their choice to drop out of the market ensured that living room keyboards would remain niche.

For a time, even big players showed interest in this model. Logitech, whose larger K400 tends to get recommended as a home theater keyboard in 2025, once made a fancy miniaturized keyboard with a visor of a case—then seemed to decide that, actually, larger keyboards were fine.

But perhaps the most interesting entrant was Lenovo, a company famed for its ThinkPad keyboards. Its opening bow on the home theater miniature keyboard market involved a T-shaped device with a trackball (and later a trackpad), naturally centering your thumb on the keyboard and allowing you to one-hand it. Clever design, and one that had a bit of a fan base—though if you want to relive the memories, smaller Chinese manufacturers have started producing knockoffs.

It turns out that, at least for a time, the laptop-maker was quietly innovating in this space. Around 2018 or so, the company quietly dropped the Lenovo 500 Multimedia Controller, a keyboard with a unique feature that no other home theater PC keyboard has: a keyboard that doubles as a giant trackpad, along the lines of a BlackBerry phone.

This device is near-impossible to find right now (I’ve looked), so I can’t give you a frame of reference on it—give me a shout if you’ve tried it. But one presumes that, even if it was bad, the basic concept was promising—and it might have improved over time with iteration.

But instead, the space for keyboards, particularly of the handheld kind, seems to have stagnated, left to tiny companies that specialize in the devices and have no real reason to disrupt what’s there. It’s all air mice and remotes with rubbery keys. And I think the problem is that a lack of software support for the model kind of made people look in other directions.

Also, and this can’t be emphasized enough: Smartphones exist.