Inspired by Joshua Topolsky's musings from last year, I decided to try my hand at hacking together a mock-up of what might be a better combination of hardware features for the next webOS device from Palm.
Sure, the Pre is a nice phone, and its slider is a clever way of fitting a QWERTY keyboard into a portrait, full-touchscreen device. But, the hassle of sliding open and closed the keyboard makes me wonder if there's a better solution.
Behold, the FrankenPre!
Forgive my shoddy Photochopping ski11z...actually, "shoddy" is still too kind. But it's kinda sorta what I have in mind. An awesome keyboard, always there, with hardware phone buttons and a landscape, capacitive touchscreen (480x360 would fit nicely there...or, dare I say, full VGA?), and the requisite gesture area immediately below the screen (with glowing LED bar borrowed from the Pixi in lieu of the Pre's completely unnecessary button).
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Geez, Craig, you just 'shopped a landscape webOS screen into Blackberry body and removed the trackball" And that would be perfectly correct.
One of my biggest beefs with the Pre is its lack of buttons available all the time to do stuff immediately without accessing menus, scrolling through launcher screens, and so forth. Letting me assign apps and contacts to every button on the device would make it a faster, more efficient user experience.
At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Sure, the Pre is a nice phone, and its slider is a clever way of fitting a QWERTY keyboard into a portrait, full-touchscreen device. But, the hassle of sliding open and closed the keyboard makes me wonder if there's a better solution.
Behold, the FrankenPre!
Forgive my shoddy Photochopping ski11z...actually, "shoddy" is still too kind. But it's kinda sorta what I have in mind. An awesome keyboard, always there, with hardware phone buttons and a landscape, capacitive touchscreen (480x360 would fit nicely there...or, dare I say, full VGA?), and the requisite gesture area immediately below the screen (with glowing LED bar borrowed from the Pixi in lieu of the Pre's completely unnecessary button).
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Geez, Craig, you just 'shopped a landscape webOS screen into Blackberry body and removed the trackball" And that would be perfectly correct.
One of my biggest beefs with the Pre is its lack of buttons available all the time to do stuff immediately without accessing menus, scrolling through launcher screens, and so forth. Letting me assign apps and contacts to every button on the device would make it a faster, more efficient user experience.
At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
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