Books are awesome. They don’t need batteries, they have indexes that make things easy to find, and they’re ridiculously easy to use. HTC shares our enthusiasm for the printed word according to a patent that was unearthed by Unwired View. Said patent, which was filed back in April 2008, though it only got approved yesterday, shows a user interface that’s equivalent to a pimped out Filofax. For those of you who don’t know what a Filofax is, it’s the pinacle of human achievement when it comes to paper based planning tools. But back to the patent, imagine a smartphone that doesn’t have icons for apps, but instead has a list of apps in much the same way that you see various dishes listed on a restaurant menu. You can click on a particular page to get to said app, or you can flip through all the apps you have on your device, just like you’d flip through a book to find a specific chapter.
Will we ever see HTC use the “book-UI” idea? That’s doubtful. When they filed this patent four years ago the iPhone was less than a year old and the first Android phone wasn’t even on the market. We all know that HTC is a huge fan of their Sense UI skin, and we don’t see them rebooting their image anytime soon. In fact, now that Google owns a handset vendor, we see the future of Android becoming less fragmented, meaning less manufacturers choosing to “differentiate” themselves by slapping their own UI on top of the work that Google’s designers spent countless hours developing.
Still, we’re just at the beginning of the smartphone revolution. Half a decade ago no one could have imagined what insane device we’d have in our pockets. So expect to see someone, maybe not HTC, come up with a completely novel way to interact with our mobile phones.