D800iDS - dual screen MOAP on Symbian phone for Japan

[Rafe]

The D800iDS from Mitsubishi is the worlds first dual internal screen clamshell. It is for the Japanese market and runs on NTT DoCoMo's FOMA network. The phone has two screens - a normal QVGA screen on the upper half, a QVGA touch panel display on the bottom half of the phone (reminiscent of the Nintendo DS). The touch panel is used to control the phone with on screen buttons and controls.

Read on in the full article.

[elp]

Waoo... this looks an awful lot like the device i've been dreaming of for years. I don't like the clamshell design and small screen but the idea of replacing the keypad with a touchscreen that displays a different set of keys depending on the current application is just brilliant and i always wondered why none of the big manufacturers launched such a device. This has already been there for years in the universal remote controls market.

This looks a lot better to me than Apple's solution of a bog-standard finger driven touch screen. With a touch-keypad, no need to remember which key corresponds to which function in each application: each application can display a customized set of keys (i.e a music player would display music control buttons in place of numeric keys).
This solves the greasy fingers problem as well since the display itself is not a touch screen, only the keypad is (it's less of a problem if the keypad is a bit dirty).
This is in my opinion much more of a UI revolution than some multi-touch display. I hope that we'll see plenty of those in the coming years. Too bad nobody is going to talk about it until some big fish copies it.

[krisse]

I'm a fan of the DS and I appreciate the advantages of this design (incidentally that phone looks VERY much like the DS Lite, which is currently outselling all other gaming devices and consoles).

However I don't think most people would want a touch screen as their keypad, it's just not nice to type numbers and text without any physical feedback.

This isn't the first time this issue has come up, the original Atari 8-bit home computers used to come with a completely flat "keyboard" which looked absolutely wonderful but was hell to use for any great length of time. Its replacements all had proper keys, and I don't think any home computer ever tried to use flat keyboards again.

Flat is fine if most of your uses for a phone are graphical, for example web browsing or dialling pre-entered numbers, but if you like to text or write emails or IMs then I think a proper keypad is required.

Now if someone could overlay a flexible screen on top of a keypad, so that the controls could be customised but there would still be a click when you pressed something... that would be the best of both worlds. But I don't think this has happened yet.