A patent has been filed by Research in Motion that’s titled “Handheld Electronic Device with Rotatable Member”. It looks like they might be working on the concept of a BlackBerry Smartphone with rotating physical QWERTY keyboard on one side and a touch screen on the other. In addition, the write up shows the phone has the capability of being used in portrait or landscape orientation.
According to the official description it reads “In a first aspect, a handheld electronic device, such as a smartphone, has a first device member and a second device member that are connected via a connector. The second device member is rotatable about a rotation axis that is canted relative to an axis of the second device member. As a result, when the second device member is rotated between a first position and a second position, its orientation changes. This may facilitate, for example, switching the handheld electronic device between a text entry mode and a telephone mode. “
It’ll be interesting to see if this comes to life… wonder what it would be called?
