Perhaps I’m seeing things here, but the diagram above simply does not make much sense to me. As you can see, RIM has patented a new keyboard configuration that has left me scratching my head. I have to admit, I had a few ‘eggnogs’ last night, but it appears as though the design team over at RIM has been doing the same for quite some time. I just can’t see how this would be practical.
From the looks of things the keyboard is a modified SureType QWERTY keyboard that has some sort of weird flip-out keys at the sides of the device to give you the full SureType keyboard. Odd.
I’m sitting here scratching my head on this one. Can you imagine what a pain in the you-know-what it would be, if you had to always flip out those extra keys on your device? I couldn’t have that. My advice to RIM? Build a full-QWERTY into the device instead, or just come up with a slider of sorts. Problem solved… with no need to pull some sort of crazy McGyver button reconfiguration trick that doesn’t make sense.
[Via: CellPassion]