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THIS KEYPAD GOES WAY BEYOND THE NUMBERSIF YOU'VE EVER USED A TELEPHONE to enter a stock symbol--into an online brokerage account, say--you know how frustrating it is to tap a key a couple times to enter just one letter. The letters IBM, for instance, require seven entries--six for the letters and the pound sign to end. It was that tedious repetition--and potential for error--that got inventor Edward D. Lin thinking. His solution: keys that press down for a number and that toggle north, south, east, and west for individual letters. To his surprise, the layout permits the functions of a computer keyboard to reside in the 12 keys of a telephone pad. By mimicking the ASCII language of keyboards, his VersaPad can accommodate Arabic, Russian, and Japanese characters. Lin is hawking the idea to telecommunications companies including Motorola, Nokia, and Philips. If he's successful, the toggling keypads may hurry the arrival of smart phones that can send custom instead of canned E-mail messages and TV remote controls that let you cruise the Internet.
Gary McWilliams
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Updated Sept. 25, 1997 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1997, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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