There are smartphones with slide-out QWERTY keyboards already on market, but we have yet to see any launch a handset with a folding QWERTY keyboard. What would such a smartphone look like? The concept design you see gives us an idea of what we could expect in a Windows Mobile phone with a slickly-designed folding keyboard. What you see here is a concept phone from Yanko Designs – in other words, this is not a real phone and will probably never make it to market with this form-factor.
Still, the folding keyboard on this Windows Mobile smartphone does make us a little nostalgic for days gone by – days when we regularly carried around a folding keyboard for extended typing sessions on our PDAs. This particular concept apparently uses a tri-fold keyboard with a little track-stick for cursor control. The touchscreen folds up from the center and supports multi-touch gestures. The keyboard itself is as full-featured as any desktop keyboard we’ve ever seen, which is nice for a concept, but totally impractical.
Head on over to Yanko Designs for more pics of the Windows Mobile folding keyboard concept smartphone.
[Via: Yanko]