14 DAY TRIAL // RIM is focusing on the area where it has had its greatest success so far, which is probably the smartest thing to do, by patenting a new folding keyboard technology. Even though the manufacturer's Blackberry mobiles are among the few that have been successfully designed so that the advantages of the QWERTY keyboard would not affect the overall view of the device, RIM is working on other such innovations.
Since the age of time, mobile manufacturers have been struggling to reduce as much as possible the disadvantages an easily manageable keyboard inflicts on the phone's design or on the size factor. As the limitations are hard to overcome and as not even the full QWERTY keyboards offering much easier messaging and typing capabilities did not satisfy users completely, this next generation foldable keypad is being developed.
The main goal is to somehow break the rules and the conventional ways such technologies are created. To accomplish the ultimate desktop typing experience, RIM has come up with a technology that allows the keyboard to fold so that the size and design can also be exploited as much as possible. The idea is that a bigger keypad than a phone's design can offer is equipped due to the folding of the extra part of that particular keyboard. Therefore, the bigger keypad delivers a much more advanced and simplified messaging and typing experience; afterwards, it folds back to its original shape.
Furthermore, this folding keypad, which breaches the phone's actual design borders, offers only two characters on each button, some arguing that the typing experience will be simplified. In theory, it looks and sounds pretty good, but the development may not work out quite as smoothly. Moreover, such an innovation may need some getting used to. Nonetheless, the idea is worth considering and developing.
Many have already ventured to call this the technology that would equip the next Blackberry mobiles, but most likely such a development will take longer than most are predicting at the moment. This technology could be regarded as a probable keyboard innovation only when RIM releases a statement on the matter.