Nokia nWAVE
Touchscreen Concept Simply Amazes!

In January, lantinian posted an excellent video on YouTube. I know it's 6 months old, but I haven't ever seen it, nor have I heard any mention of this concept device from any of my fellow Freaks, so I thought I'd take the time to give a little overview of it.

I'm not sure if this is an official Nokia animation, or merely a users dream. It lacks physical buttons, which is a major turnoff in my book, but it is just a concept.

And it definitely looks as if it has Nokia bloodlines, with a Nokia style camera bezel with a shutter cover switch, ala N95-1, combination storage slot cover and stand that works in both landscape and portrait modes, and an extra wide aspect ratio touchscreen in an ultra thin candybar formfactor I could easily love!

Probably the two most jaw dropping feature of this concept are simply amazing, genius in design, and easily implemented with today's technology. The first is the touchscreen's design.

The extra wide touchscreen is curved, but not like the XPeria X1's opened slider is curved. This thing curves like a banana, from top to bottom. This will facilitate closer microphone proximity to the mouth, for possibly easier sound detection, and maybe even eliminate some light reflections.

The greatest advantage is that the concave screen. When the phone is placed face down, can never touch a flat surface, allowing only the 4 corners of the device to contact the surface. This completely protects the screen from contact.

The next great feature of this device is a combination of the hardware and software, and is the greatest of the device! Keeping with S60 heritage, the phone keeps T9 functionality, adds a one-handed compressed QWERTY layout, and can be used with only one hand.

Except for the one-handed QWERTY, that may be no big deal for most Nokia Nseries users. But when in landscape mode, the device converts to a split, two-handed QWERTY layout, with the screen in the middle! I've used this layout on previous Nokia S40 flip devices in around 2004, and really liked it for QWERTY typing, finding it quite natural.

I can't stop imagining the possibilities we'll be seeing soon, but obviously, someone had the vision to create and innovate at least 6 months ago! This could never see the light of day, or be the groundwork for the next premium Nseries 5th Edition device.

Better yet, maybe they add the physically formed morphing screen buttons from that other Nokia concept, throw in the first Symbian Foundation build, and let Tat do the GUI, and this becomes alot more interesting.