HTC has filed a patent for a new type of slider phone that allows users to choose between keypad entry and full keyboard entry a-la-Helio-Ocean by sliding the screen at a funny angle. These mock-ups by UnwiredView give us an idea of what the final product might look like. Interesting idea, but it seems silly to make the screen so small when the keyboard already sets the footprint size. We’ll have to wait to see the final product, I guess, but you can see the sketches they submitted for the patent behind the jump.
Continue reading ‘HTC Patents New Slider’
Yet another item from the fanciful land of patent filings: the “Hybrid Portrait-Landscape Handheld Device With Trackball Navigation and Qwerty Hideaway Keyboard”. It might be thought that the whole hideaway keypad and orientation detection thing has been done, but obviously not with a trackball, otherwise this filing wouldn’t have gone through. Considering another patent of this variety has been released recently, it’s easy to get enthusiastic about the idea of a BlackBerry with significant form factor changes. For the bookish, you can check out the whole patent filing here.