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Microsoft Takes Aim at the iPhone

by Tim Stevens on July 19, 2007 at 05:22 PM


If there's one problem with designing smart phones, it's their size. They have to be small or they stop looking like phones and start looking like expensive plastic bricks. But, managing a phone-like shape plus packing in a decent keypad and a readable screen is a tall order that few have managed to pull off effectively. For the iPhone, Apple did away with the keypad entirely, relying only on a touch screen. But Microsoft (being Microsoft) is taking a bit of a different route with a patent for a touch pad on the back of the device.

No, we're not talking about something like Samsung's funky UpStage, which has a keypad and small LCD on the front and a second, larger LCD on the back. Microsoft's touch pad would have you holding the phone like normal, using your index finger on the top of the back of the phone to move a cursor or select things on the screen as if you were tapping it from behind. This means you could do everything on the phone one-handed: enter text messages through a real keypad with your thumb and tap things on the screen from the back.

Just when or if this interesting phone control design will take shape in reality remains to be seen, but with talk of Microsoft working on a Zune-branded iPhone competitor this might just be a key aspect of it. Of course, Apple might beat Microsoft to the punch on this one too given the recent patent filing for a double-sided touchscreen iPod.

From CrunchGear

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Tags: iPhone, UpStage, Zune

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