aaron evans

This phone apparently sucks. See that cool scroll wheel (just like the iPod!!!)? Turns out it’s a poorly designed four-directional pad.

Okay, WWAD (What would Apple do?). Let’s assume they’re designing a phone (which everybody believes they are). My guess is that they will attempt to minimize the number of buttons on the phone and perhaps have no buttons at all, just a screen that doubles as a keypad when you’re dialing. I’m not the first person to think of this idea. Synaptics has a concept phone that uses this kind of interface:

Still looks a little too cluttered but maybe that’s just the super-futuristic interface in the screenshot on the phone. Again, the following is not my original idea but I think Apple will make the screen the whole front of the phone and have the screen’s color match the case so that the screen effectively disappears into the phone when not in use. Apple could even make certain parts of the screen active so that the phone looks like an iPod (part of the screen acts as a scrollwheel, the top half acts as a display). Then, the user touches something and the relevant part of the phone becomes a keypad. Sound confusing? I’ve got faith that Apple can do it and others will copy it.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 7:44 am and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.