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(Yet Another) Mobile Keypad

Posted by Hemos on from the and-then-you-do-a-handstand-and dept.

A reader wrote to us about Intel's newly unveiled mobile keypad, which, all things considered, doesn't look nearly as terrible as most mobile keypads. Still not exactly stirring, but not too bad either. Of course, there's getting it into production, licensing etc etc

6 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. A good mobile keyboard is . . by Brahmastra · · Score: 5, Interesting

    . . . a dead mobile keyboard. Every mobile input device I've used until now is slow and sucks arse. A good speech based input device may help but you can't use that everywhere. It'll be like the annoying cellphone freaks who think we want to listen to their conversation in a restaurant.

  2. What about us with big fingers? by GuyinVA · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I already have a hard enough time with a regular key pad, now I have to deal with this too? The idea is good, but will not be usefull for me.

  3. Even smaller keys? by fruey · · Score: 3, Interesting
    What are these mobile designers on? Acid, probably, if they suddenly develop a random love of small things, maybe to them it looks "massive"?

    Now, I love the T1 predictive typing thing. As long as you can spell more or less accurately then you can get very fast on that, and you still only need the letter keys. However, having seen proof from many people I tell about it who never switch it on because they don't "get it" or get frustrated... maybe it's not the way forward. Also, ppl cnt wrt abbrvs in thr texts w dicts...

    I also liked the look of that system where letters sort of scrolled in front of you and you picked the one you wanted, automatically likely choices for the next letter were bigger and so on. Wasn't particularly intuitive though, even less so than T1 dictionary stuff.

    But now, tiny keys, and not in the QWERTY pattern either? How is this helping? And you have to press multiple keys to get numbers, once the basis of all telephone dialling circuit I/O?

    Just another gimmick. There's a proverb from some oriental culture that says 'there are those that will try to sell the same thing with an extra spurious (useless) addition on the merits of the spurious addition, and win the marketing war'

    Rough translation, obviously.

    --
    Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
  4. You're totally missing the point... by WIAKywbfatw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This isn't a keyboard for PDAs, it's a keyboard for mobile phones, hence the juxtaposition of alphabetical keys around a numeric keypad with the primary focus still on the numbers.

    The whole purpose of this layout is to make texting (sending text messages via SMS) easier but the primary focus is still on dialling.

    This isn't designed for PDA text entry. It's not even designed for PDA/phone convergence devices. It's designed for phones and phones only.

    --

    "Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
  5. Ick. by Kaki+Nix+Sain · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Why did they put the keys in alphabetical order. Bad, bad, bad.

    Would have been better to pick this layout

    --

    (C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.

  6. QWERTY keyboard by JaCKeL+1.0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I know someone might steal this idea but, anyway, I want to help the development. Why not keep this great concept and by rotating the phone right, we can have a QWERTY type keyboard instead of the ABCD type proposed by the prototype. You just have to add a little sensor able to rotate de display in the direction the phone is rotated and now IM will sell like hot bread.