New Blackberry Patent for Angular Keys

Posted by: dcwalton on Dec 26 2007

Everyone knows that women have dainty little hands and fingers and in fact, we are genetically designed to use keyboards on devices like the Blackberry. Men, on the other hand, have giant fingers making it almost impossible to press one key at a time. This means that discussions around mobile devices often centre around how easy it is to type. Now, no-one has ever said I have dainty hands - nor do I think they ever would! However, I never struggle that much using keyboards on devices either. In fact, all I ask for a is a keyboard laid out in QWERTY style with one button for each letter and an easy way to switch to capitals and symbols - and of course a spell checker. I often wonder what I did before the introduction of red squiggly lines in Word…spelt badly I guess!

Anyway, it appears that RIM has patented a new keyboard style with angular keys. This seems to have the advantage of making the keys individually much bigger - although on the diagram I saw, it also seemed to portray the Blackberry as much bigger too - definitely not a good thing! I don’t know how well this would work - when Microsoft took a similar radical step with their keyboard it worked really well but stopped you from ever being able to type on a regular keyboard again. I guess that would not be as much of an issue on the Blackberry - after all, anything that makes it easier to type on a device that is used predominantly for email has to be a good thing. What I like about this is that it is a forward step from a company that seems to have spent the last few years playing catch-up. Apart from the wheel interface, which was very unique to the Blackberry, everything else has appeared to be one step behind the market. Maybe we are actually reaching the point where they are moving ahead of the market in design?

Via: Gizmodo

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