04 January 2008

Samsung's Modular Keyboard Patent?
Don't change your phone, just the keypad?

Since the iPhone became finally public with it's "revolutionary" input method/user interface and all growing controversy 'n' doubts that it causes, the input interface technologies on the mobile phones becomes the pretty actual and in focus nowadays.

It seams that new no-buttons handset signals that mobiles as we know them may soon be a thing of the past?

Eventually, control surfaces will give rise to soft interfaces, where buttons, keypads, keyboards and various navigation elements are rendered graphically on a touch-sensitive screen to provide interfaces which can change dynamically depending on context and the application.

Sounds good but there is a problem unfortunately; it is the lack of stimulus for the sense of touch. When you touch it, it doesn’t touch you back, and therefore most of us still prefer the good old buttons instead of a piece of flat and cold glass.

We use our hands and sense of touch in exploring environments that have poor or no visibility and to deal with things that are right in front of us. Without our fifth sense and tactile feedback its hard to deal with the world around us, and especially with mobile devices. Based on my personal experience, it's hard to orient yourself and control the interface without seeing it. For me it is actually impossible!

The good thing is that the Samsung has just filed patent that addressing the best of both worlds? Flexibility of the touch screen based controls and usability of the physical keypads with tactile feedback?

There's no need to switch handsets if you want to leap from numeric to QWERTY, because you can just hot swap the keypad. As you can imagine, there are countless other possible applications, including a hot-swapped gaming pad, music controls, and so forth.

The patent envisions a phone in which the battery pack will have a keypad engraved on its outer surface. So if you want a QWERTY keypad, you can simply change the battery and start typing a lengthy e-mail. Actually, there are countless possibilities, hot swap gaming pad, music controls, touch pad ;)

Interesting idea if you ask me but I am afraid that it will be a little bit unpractical to carry those entire user interfaces with you and change it when you need it!?

Actually, in my personal opinion the few weeks ago revealed Nokia triple slider is quite better solution as it simply has it all packed into triple sliding from factor!?