Windows Phone 8 to get curvy one-handed keyboard?
A curvaceous on-screen keyboard could be heading to Windows Phone 8, a spy-shot suggests.
You've got an important text to send, but you're also trying to flag down a taxi, make a rude gesture at an enemy or fight off a marauding seagull. It's a nightmare scenario, but possibly not for much longer, as spy-shots leak suggesting that Windows Phone 8 will feature a one-handed one-screen keyboard.
WMPoweruser got hold of the snap above, which reportedly comes from a leaked Microsoft Research presentation. As you can see, the keyboard is curved to fit your thumb, with individual characters sorted into distinct blocks.
To me that suggests a predictive keyboard -- so if you tap the button with 'r t y u' on it and then 'i o p', the phone could guess that you're trying to write 'to', for instance.
Any radical keyboard changes would likely make their debut with Windows Phone 8, the newest version of Microsoft's operating system that will arrive in several months, sporting a brand-new homescreen with resizeable tiles.
Microsoft induced frowny faces in Windows Phone fans when it confirmed Windows Phone 8 would not be coming to existing devices, even factory-fresh ones like the Nokia Lumia 900.
The fact that the arc-shaped keypad above is running on an HTC 7 Trophy, however, is reason to hope that any new keyboard software will make it to Windows Phone 7.8, a not-quite-Windows-Phone-8 update that's heading to current Windows Phone mobiles, and will play host to the redesigned homescreen.
How do you think that wavy keyboard would work? Can you see yourself ditching regular keyboards to use this quirky one-handed option? Let me know in the comments or on our Facebook wall.
Image credit: WMPoweruser