TL;DR Google Japan has a long history of announcing humorous new keyboard ideas.
Last year the team brought us an infinitely curving Mobius strip keyboard.
This year we’re going back to the days of rotary phones, with a rotary-dial keyboard.
Has the Google of 2025 lost some of the spark that made the company seem like such a fun place to work in decades past? That’s probably a fair criticism, and while it may have been an inevitability for a tech firm of this size, we’re still just pleased as punch when some of that old, weird Google manages to shine through. That’s exactly why we’re as happy as we are to see the crew over at Google Japan so gleefully coming back year after year with a preposterous new keyboard design — and this year, they cooked up something just fantastically bizarre.
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Remember rotary dialing on phones? No? That’s OK, we’ll wait while you go ask someone over the age of 45. Back before we had touch-tone dialing, calling someone meant that you actually had to physically turn a dial, sticking your finger in the correct hole for the digit you wanted and turning as far as it could go. It was a slow process, waiting for the dial to spin back to its starting position before repeating for each digit, but it worked. At least, it was a passable system for dealing with numbers 0-9.
But then those wacky Google Japan folks got this dial idea stuck in their heads and thought, “why don’t we just expand that with more, bigger dials and squeeze in a whole keyboard’s worth of characters?” And that’s exactly what they put together for the co-called Gboard Dial Version.
In addition to letter input, Google incorporates multiple additional dials for everything from modifier keys to directional arrows. Even the return key rotates like a dial:
Maybe the craziest thing about this? You can actually build one. Google has released its plans for the Gboard Dial Version to GitHub, where you can 3D-print and wire up a functional version for yourself. There’s a single-dial version that’s just the letters to get you started, of if you’re feeling ambitious you can go after the complete 9-dial edition.
If you’re already warming up your 3D printer to give this a shot, be sure to swing back to our comment section afterwards and let us know how it went!
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