TYPO-CASES-DUALWhen most of us aren’t satisfied with the current state of mobile technology, we don’t have any recourse but to hope that someone comes up with something better. But if you’re a high-powered, wealthy Hollywood go-getter, you have a few other options.

GigaOm and AllThingsD are reporting that Hollywood exec Ryan Seacrest was fed up with having to carry two cell phones with him all the time—one for typing and another one for everything else. He just couldn’t get used to the on-screen keyboard in his “everything else” phone, and needed a physical thumb board to type usefully. So he put his money where his mouth was, co-founding a start-up company to produce the Typo, a new type of Bluetooth keyboard case and putting at least $1 million into it.

The case snaps together around an iPhone, covering up the lower part of its bezel including the “Home” button, and features a Bluetooth thumb keyboard reminiscent of the keyboards from Blackberry phones. It will be available for the iPhone 5 and 5s in January at a cost of $99, and will come out for other phones and tablets later.

Personally, I’m happy with Swype on my Android devices, but if I were still on an iPod Touch I might be tempted by this myself. Thumb keyboards do have a few advantages over the virtual version, not least of which is freeing up more screen real-estate since you don’t have a keyboard covering it. The drawback is it’s not terribly useful in landscape mode, of course.

Anyway, kudos to Ryan Seacrest for seeing a problem and funding the solution. Wouldn’t it be nice if more people with money would pay to solve the little problems that irk us all?

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