Continuing with the one row keyboard patent app.....
reading it I see a few more details
The option is left open for the keyboard to be a flip out attached accessory or slide out also instead of just fixed.
One of the keyboard buttons is for cycling through predictive text selections.
To switch from numbers to letters you press two keys at the same time.
They also show it curved and used on a phone handset
They call it a phone but it looks like a tablet to me.
It has a dpad, options and clear button next to the screen.

Nokia patent application 20090059491

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-P...AND+TTL/device


is a patent application on slding mechanisms and one of the images presents a pretty novel handset which I think you guys should all see.

Figure 7a through 7d has two swivel arms attached to the full qwerty keyboard underneath that let the keyboard rotate into both landscape and portrait positions.



Figure 3a is a handset with both a top and bottom slide out part at the same time figure 3b (seems useless to me)



Figure 6A shows a full qwerty keyboard that stays full in both landscape and portrait.
You gotta see that one because I don't think anyone has thought of that mechanism before.



Figure 8a through 8d has a slide out landscape keyboard with two swivel plates on either side of it. They are leaving it open as to what the plates do mouse etc..



Figure 9f shows a slide out landscape letter keyboard to the left and the number pad swivels from portrait over to become the right side of the landscape keyboard so that you have letters on the left numbers on the right.



You know what?.... Nokia should just come on to maemo.org and ask us what form factor we want. Take a vote on several sites. Post the images of the different form factors and ask us to vote on them. They should do that on several sites and then repeat the process for phones.
That would give them their next 5 phone models and tablet models. They don't have to give out all the details and of course things get changed during production and testing.

Those posts about patents would be much more interesting if they included usable pictures.

I can't convert tiffs to jpegs or gifs. I tried using super c and it didn't work.

Otherwise I would have copied them and put them up on photobucket for everyone to see.
Anyone know of a program I can use to do this?

I gave you the link to the patent so that you can view the images yourself.
You can't click on the images link at the top of the patent app and view the tiffs?

If it is not working for you then download alternatiff from alternatiff.com
and you will have to get rid of quicktimes hold on viewing tiff because for me quicktime highjacks the tiff viewing in Firefox and IE but won't actually display the images. All I see is a quicktime logo that quickly appears and then disappears and no image.

So i had to uninstall quicktime and reinstall alternatiff.

Photobucket doesn't accept tiff images.
edit... wait I found an online free tiff converter. Hold on and I'll upload them to photobucket and then i will edit the above post with the jpg forms of the images.
http://www.coolutils.com/Online-Image-Converter.php#

Weird. I can't view the images either -- and I have a bleeding-edge Mac with, um, everything on it. When I load a page with an image on it, I see the QuickTime plugin attempt to load something, but then I just get a blank space where something should be.

Hmf.

Tim

I also cannot view the images... strange. I used to be able to...

Thanks for mentioning that fact, which Ragnar forgot to mention. I was beginning to think that the Nokia part was named after the town, or it was just a giant coincidence.

I can see the pics just fine.

Figure 3a with the top and bottom slide out which was called "useless" has already been used on previous Nokia phones though the model name escapes me (I seem to remember the one I came across having arabic keys on the keyboard as well as qwerty). The idea is that you would slide out the "wings" and hold it in landscape mode so that your hands would be holding the phone by the wings, giving you the keyboard for use with your thumbs.

Yeah, it's not too great.

When they say, "they can't see the pics" they are talking about the pics at the uspto.gov website, not the ones that I have posted here.
The ones on the uspto website are in tiff format.
For some reason quicktime defaults as the image viewer for your browser for tiffs every time you do a quicktime update but fails to actually show you the image in the browser so quicktime is extremely annoying to me. I uninstalled it just because of that. I have to see patent images. I am always looking at patents.

Well, perhaps we're on a different wavelength here.

For me, there was a two-step process.

1. Realizing that Nokia is going in a direction that doesn't interest me at the moment.

2. Now that I've decided not to go with Nokia, what toy to get next? I already have a Centro and a year to go on my plan. I don't need a phone, and in a year things will be a lot different.

So, I'm definitely not giving $300+ to Nokia, which doesn't want or need my money.

I do read lots of ebooks. The Kindle seems popular, but I don't like captive environments, the same reason I don't go with Apple products.

Reading on a tablet seems just fine to me, but a bigger tablet might be nice. I don't care about e-paper.

Thus my decision. The key part where Nokia was involved was in convincing me it wasn't worth waiting for whatever Nokia is doing, whenever it is doing it. In a year, I'll reconsider.