Protos

Why is it always Asia that has all the new brilliant ideas?

Phoneyworld has the story of how NTT DoCoMo and Mitsubishi have changed the keypad of a main consumer smart-phone.

The short conclusion is that since the new mobiles have so many functions it makes no sense to force a standard keypad to serve as input for all types of applications. Therefore they employ a touch screen, but not for the actual display – the touch screen is used where we would normally find buttons. This allows for the Interaction Designers to have pixel control of the area reserved for button!

An excerpt:

“In this case the display is standard, whereas the keypad is a touchscreen. The main objective of this exercise is that modern cell phones with their multiple features have become too complicated. There are a lot of people out there who would love to have these functions and dont mind paying for them but the user interface is getting too complicated for them to adjust. This technology simplifies things a lot. Depending on the main menu, the keypad shows only the associated keys. The phone would thus have literally two displays, one which acts as only the output while the other one (the keypad) can take the input and display keys depending upon the requirement. There are 3 fixed buttons though, these are shortcuts for immediately accessing the keypad (the numeric keys get displayed on the input screen), for going back and forward.”

Only downsides I can think of is the lack of tactile feedback and the fact that the cognitive strain might increase slightly while learning that the interface is application dependant.

In general I think this is a very smart move – I would prefer that type of Interface over the keypad any day – but hey! I use the Qtek S100 with Windows mobile – so I already do =)