I only ever played with a friend’s, who loathed the thing, but I liked the Blackberry Storm’s clickable screen, enjoying the compromise between a touch screen and tactile give. But it was only a cursory satisfaction with clickiness… the same cursory satisfaction that has caused so many people to first love, then loathe the Storm, as the novelty becomes digitally exhausting annoyance for text entry and the like.
This Mozilla concept phone takes the same approach but merges it with segmented lower screen, Optimus Maximus style. Most of the time, those buttons are interactive widgets or shortcuts, but they are replaced during text entry with a predictive keyboard.
The concept designers think this will solve the text entry problems of the storm: “What if instead of predictive text, a predictive keyboard displayed the expected characters, allowing the user to preempt a mistake rather than fixing it after the fact?”
That could work well, but it seems like a large screen real estate sacrifice, neutering the phone’s landscape potential (oh, sure, you could watch a movie or play a game in landscape mode on this phone, but there’d be distracting, criss-crossing crevices on half the screen). A clickable touchscreen is a nice extra, but its bad thinking to think that clicking input on a user’s part should be required.
Maximizing channels of communication [Mozphone via Core77 via Gizmodo]
Here’s a little chestnut for all you gentle-folks out there – how about a touchscreen that has a series of “inflatable” transparent pockets over the surface, that can be inflated/deflated/combined/rearranged depending on where and how big the touchscreen buttons need to be.
Obviously it is actually impossible in the “real-world”, but, you know, is really cool in my head.
I’ve got a Storm so I may be biased, but I must say I prefer it. It’s got a better picture quality and much sharper lines. I also found this website, unlocking blackberry – it’s really helpful if you want to get a blackberry on a different network.