LG’s new KF510 slider mobile is a skinny 11mm deep, with a touchpad control, slide-out conventional keys, and an animation-loaded user interface. The “Touch Lighting Phone” also packs a 3-megapixel autofocus camera, and is metal-framed, with graduated metal paintwork. Available in March, around US$330, not much else is known about the phone yet. [GSM Arena]
According to a patent filed by Apple, the company’s MacBook touchpads and signature iPod clickwheel might be in for a very visual overhaul. The proposed technology will allow for both lighting and color responses to user interaction. If Apple follows through with its plans, when you get to use touchpads and clickwheels on next generation products, you might get a bit of a show.
While most of it sounds fairly cosmetic, the idea of a touchpad that glows brighter with more pressure, follows around tactile input by the user, and changes color sounds pretty damn cool to us, and helps make things more intuitive on the user’s end. The 34 page patent outlines the plans which sound like anything from an LCD touchscreen to a traditional touchpad backlit with LEDs. From the patent:
By way of example, it may be desirable to provide visual stimuli at the touch pad so that a user can better operate the touch pad. For example, the visual stimuli may be used (among others) to alert a user when the touch pad is registering a touch, alert a user where the touch is occurring on the touch pad, provide feedback related to the touch event, indicate the state of the touch pad, and/or the like.
Hopefully we’ll actually see these ideas put to good use, rather than just a patent blocking others from using it. [US Patent Office via AppleInsider]
You might be looking at plans for the iPhone nano. Here’s a patent application by Apple, dated today, that shows a simplified input pad with numbers on it, and it could conceivably be a simple follow-on to the iPhone. The touchpad “displays graphical elements to indicate input areas of the touchpad,” and as you can see, it displays those symbols in a circular arrangement.
Not only is this evidence of a possible next generation of simplified Apple cellphones, it also indicates that Apple is probably not going to abandon the click wheel just yet. It all makes sense: Apple has a highly capable smart phone, but what about a basic cellphone, lower-priced and simplified, for the rest of us who just want to talk and don’t necessarily need to carry a $600 computer around with them 24/7?
Apple’s Patent Application [US Patent and Trademark Office, via Unwired View]
