5 touchscreen keyboard designs for Blackberry 9000 to beat iPhone

I read news and discussions about the upcoming Blackberry 9000 (The news seemed to be originally from here.).The concentration of the arguments is on its touch screen keyboard.

Studies seemed to indicate the touch screen keyboard on iPhone harms speed.

I have had a Dell PDA and one of the early Moto touch screen phones. I also have a Blackberry 7130. I love the keyboard design. I think experience have proved that hardware QWERTY keyboard has its advantages and that RIM are already aware of that. It's just easier to input single letters with QWERTY keyboards.

On screen keyboard is not generally as easy to use as a QWERT keyboard. Some studies claim that on screen keyboards decrease efficiency - on screen keyboards are harder to handle than a solid keyboard. However, on screen keyboards has its advantages, flexibility and interactiveness. A hardware keyboard is fixed but a software keyboard can adapt. Here are a few ways I thought of that could help increase efficiency and make a good user experience as well.

1. Multiple word completion choices.

With a traditional keyboard, you can only have one word showing on the screen or you have to navigate through choices. However, you can have multiple easily accessible word choices as more carefully explained in section 1 in this post.

Sketch:

2. Different keyboard modes.

According to different situations, you can choose to have keyboard with more buttons with each button smaller just like a full blackberry QWERTY keyboard or a compact keyboard as in 7130.

3. Mouse-gesture-like.

A lot of browsers nowadays support mouse gestures(See Wikipedia explanation).

I haven't thought of a good way to actualize "finger gesture", but it is an idea to work on.

4. Magnifying certain letters.

The keyboard could follow the the finger and expand wherever the finger is moving to. As the upper pictures show. Or, we could let the other characters kind of fall away from the character we're currently pointing to. This way, it makes typing in the current character easier.

Another idea is to magnify the most "probable" letters. For example, after you typed st , "a" (and maybe some other keys) should be magnified. Another merit of magnifying (besides it is easier to type what you want) is that it keeps the letter relatively fixed - it is almost where it was. It is very important to predict where things are if we want to type fast. If at each time, the keys are at a different place, then it will be horrible for speed. But the magnifying preserves the relative position and helps efficiency.

5. This is what I think the most promising design appropriately used.

With some cameras, you can tip it whichever way and the picture will always show in the right direction, ie. upword. The cameras has some directional or gravity sensor. With a touchscreen keyboard, such a thing can be used too.

So when you tip it, say to the left, the left part of the keyboard become bigger (or smaller, depending on how you play Halo :);whether you use the normal or inverse height view). When you tip it to the right, the right part become bigger. Tip it to the front, the upper part becomes bigger, and of course, this can work in every direction. So it should be not too hard to access Q if you tip well, in spite of the somehow boundary location when it is hard to access with a screen keyboard. They could even design it to be a sphere intrinsically so you can keep tipping and wrap around to the other side, even though I think the planar design will work better.

There's much to optimize about this, like the sensitivity to directional change which makes the keyboard reasonably stable but responsive. But I think this will help because according to my experience, when you use a touchscreen keyboard, you naturally tip it to different directions to help you point the right letter or press the right letter, so experimental evidence may prove its even ergonomic.



Blackberry has patented a "garage door" like keyboard and I wonder how did that idea come through. I hope I can see my ideas become reality. It is quite obvious that the designs work for any touch screen so I'll see who approaches me first :).


This is a pretty cool idea for a keyboard. I like it. But if they're going to do a touchscreen, I think mine are worth a shot too :).

Update: I received an email from help@rim.net in a day and they said they forwarded my message to bbsuggestions@blackberry.com. So help@rim.net can actually be quite helpful. Fast reply. But I'll see how long bbsuggestions will take.

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