
Why are cellphone-keyboards never on the backside? - louithethrid
I just never understood that. If you have the phone in your hand, four of five fingers allready reside on the backside.
If you add a touchpad there, ghost the fingertips and add some haptics, you have a keyboard without screen ofuscation.
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cocktailpeanuts
Try this:

Take a blackberry and try typing a sentence without looking at it. That's what
it feels like. I had the same question and even thought about prototyping a
hardware, but thank god I tried pseudo experiments before doing that.

Laptop keyboards work without looking because the keys are large enough that
once you lock in your two index fingers onto the little bumps on F and J keys
the rest depends on your muscle memory, but that's not the case for mobile
devices.

But what really seals the deal is even if you somehow manage to pull off the
haptic feedback part, you're trying to make people relearn an entirely new way
of typing it's almost like learning a new keyboard layout. Just like dvorak
keyboard never caught on even though it was much more efficient, unless
there's a significantly next level benefit, it will be very tough to get
people to use them.

That's why I had the same idea and played around with several ideas on this,
and then decided that it wouldn't work. The benefit was not worth all the
hassle.

~~~
Pica_soO
But if you used a lowres camera to silouette the fingers?

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cjbprime
My cellphone is inside a case.

