Art Lebedev Art Lebedev Studio, a design studio from Russia who develops innovative keyboards with keys that contain displays, said late Sunday that the first batch of its Optimus Maximus keyboards to be delivered in December, has been fully pre-ordered in twelve hours.

“The first 200 keyboards (to be shipped December, 1^st) were pre-ordered in about 12 hours. When the section on Optimus Maximus opened, our site was almost down for the first 15 minutes. In nine hours there has been more than 100 000 unique visitors,” said Artemy Lebedev, the head of the design studio.

Optimus Maximus is a full-sized 113-keys keyboard with colour OLED screens located inside each key. The screens are 10.1mm² large and have 48x48 pixels resolution, according to its developers. Specially designed software will be able to change images on the colour screens depending on the program running.

The design studio hopes to obtain first fully functional engineering sample of the keyboard in late June and to be in position to ship the first batch, or 200 pieces, of Optimus Maximus starting 31^st of November. The company promises that in December, 2007 and January, 2008 it will ship another 200 and 400 units, respectively.

Art Lebedev started accepting pre-orders on its Optimus keyboard on the 20^th of May, but, apparently, the company’s online store and payment system were not designed to support so much attention from potential customers and, according to the statement, some users experienced difficulties.

“Some people had trouble with the payment system – we’ll investigate the issues tomorrow morning, during their working hours. No need to worry – we keep track of all the orders and those who placed an order on Sunday, but whose cards has not been charged, will get contacted by our store managers,” it was claimed.

Currently Art Lebedev is selling the Optimus mini three keypad with coloured keys for $160/€128 per unit.