FIRST!! (I think): 90's Sliding Keyboard Phone
Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 2:54AM
This is the first of my FIRST!!(I think) posts, where I trot out stuff I think was invented by me. I'm sure somebody out there on the internets will prove me wrong in short order.
Here's a sliding keyboard phone concept done for a bizdev guy in late 1998 for Qualcomm's QCP(Consumer Products) division. I used to dig the two-way RIM pagers IT guys rocked, and loved my Palm Pilot. This was an attempt to combine a pager-like form factor with voice & PDA functionality. Notice the monochrome display common to phones and PDA's of the era. I don't know why the wired earbud mike was rendered small enough to fall into your ear canal though.
A closeup of the fuzzy, cheezy sample UI shown above. As I remember, the product was aimed at the enterprise, so in this example use-case I attempted to portray the indispensable mobile comm unit for the hip cable-guy of the near future. Note the stock prices on the right frame of the display, I miss the pre dot-com crash stock market..
Anthony
Reader Comments (2)
Cool concept, you should have gone live with it way back then. What's next on tap? When you invent something, be sure you pantent it.
Hey Maisha, thanks for taking a look. Yeah re:Patents, lesson learned. The company did not want to pursue a patent, and every time I see somebody with a slider, I cringe. I'll be contacting you soon on some of the stuff coming up soon.