With an increasing number of options being made available to use physical keyboards with an iPhone, you can call this a mini-industry of sorts. 

First, we had iPhone hackers wiring up their iPhone to a physical keyboard. Then we had iTwinge, which lets you attach an actual Blackberry-style keyboard to your iPhone. This was then followed by more sophisticated solutions like the recent BTStack Keyboard app for jailbroken iPhones. 

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) currently on at Las Vegas has introduced us to one solution. This comes from Ion, the manufacturers of USB turnables and cassette decks. Called the iType, it is a physical keyboard with a slot on top for users to fit in their iPhone. iType interacts with the iPhone through the device's docking port to help you type quicker with the keyboard. 

This is arguably the more sophisticated among all the keyboard add-ons to the iPhone so far. The manufacturers have indicated that the device might go on sale from the second quarter of this year at a price close to £70. 

If such physical keyboard solutions for the iPhone do not interest you, Ion has also come up with another device –  iDiscovery keyboard is a Piano simulator. This is similar to the iType keyboard where the users fit in their iPhone into the slot on top of the device. Once done, the iDiscovery keyboard interacts with the Keyboard tutor iPhone app to help you with your Piano lessons. 

Check out the images of the devices below: 

What do you think? Will you go for them? Tell us in the comments. 

[via Reg Hardware]