What about having a qwerty keyboard on a cell phone laid out in a circlular design? Everyone complains about the size of the phone/palm combos, and the blackberry has shown that people can learn to type fairly well with their thumbs. So, why not have the letters of the keyboard pie shaped to save space and have two circles of letters in order to use both thumbs at the same time. Each letter would be connected with another so that you could rock your thumb forward and backward to type two letters quickly. The design should save enough space to have a full keyboard on a regular size cell phone and it would be easy to use. Just a thought.
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the prior art on compact, one handed, and telephone keyboards is staggering.
the most successful is the tegic t9 predictivetyping system, acquired by AOL, and inside manytelephones.
chord keyboards like the bat and the twiddler are used in wearable computer hobby clubs.
Besides the poor chicklet keyboards on theblackberry and treo, and the soft keyboardson other palms, there are better soft keyboardslike the Fitaly and the Tengo.
Nokia has the 6800 phone and the communicator whichflips open for a full keyboard. the fastap keyboardis integrated between touchtone keys.
The best keyboard only uses 4 switches to generate 28 codes.I know because I invented it in 1984 after buying the first "pocket computer" from casio. It which doesnt use chording and thus allows finger overlap and the speedup of rollover. two patents are available for licensing.
Professor, you only need one button; and the telegraph is in the public domain.
I'd like to see extended alphanumeric keypads on phones, that way, you could have your name as your phone number in a similar way as to your email address. Extension of DTMF may be required that is backwards compatible, and perhaps the new alphabet could be lowercase to distinguish it from old-style vanity numbers where the letters are three on a number button. Perhaps it is as simple as two tones per letter, as is already done, if you push "a", the tones for #21 (# + key 2 + letter 1) would be sent.
i do not see any benefit of this idea, as the qwerty keyboard is standard, and creating a new circular design would mean that people would need to adjust to the arrangement before their typing speed would even recover to what they can do with the qwerty. my phone has a full keyboard, and it works fine for me