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FYI Palm had original bluetooth keyboards support, and long before smartphones ever existed.
Omg how useful this is!
I used a Palm m-series with one of these keyboards while in high school, in order to type while on the school bus. I wish I still had it to test this out!
I did a similar thing with the esp, which would fit inside the keyboard when folded. Of course the battery still wouldn't fit.
I have one of the Palm V keyboards, and recently bought a $20 Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad, but am considering spending the time building one of these because it's such a nice hack. Bookmarked.
Of note, for a while a Chinese OEM was selling a copy of the Palm Portable Keyboard with bluetooth. (Main irritant: they used USB charging but put a very non-standard socket on the keyboard end -- it resembles a 4-pin firewire cable, only not quite -- which put a stop to me using mine.)
USB Mini A? That’s the one “standard” USB connector I don’t have in my cable cabinet…
Based on his description, that could be it.

I bought a pair of smart watches in Singapore around 2003 that charged with one of these. Never saw that connection again.

(MP3 player, video player, notes, PDA functions, etc. 15 years before smart watches went mainstream. I watched On Her Majesty's Secret Service on the flight home.)

I think the brand was gyes, I have one in a cupboard somewhere.

The usb port was a standard that's rarely used, but wasn't proprietary.

I have an early release version of this keyboard that I used to do a lot of relatively distraction-free writing on my Palm V back in the day. The keyboard was very well made and got lots of admiring looks whenever I popped it open. It would be great to have an off-the-shelf bluetooth adapter for it! Kudos to pymo for a neat and useful DIY implementation.
This was a great keyboard. I wrote most of the content for my first web site sitting on the roof of my building with one of these and a U.S. Robotics Palm III.

The only problem was that I could type way faster than the PDA could keep up. I guess hooking it up to something modern via Bluetooth removes that limitation.