Back to the PSP

Couple of things that I wanted to mention in the last post on the PSP I did...but it got too long and so I decided to save it for a rainy day. One exception...with the rain came snow...yup...been snowing like mad here...I will post a couple of pics later on.

So first things first. I've mentioned the onscreen keyboard numerous times but I had an idea flash into my mind the other day.


Above is the PSP keyboard if you haven't seen it. Its a strange beast in many ways. It is useful in some ways but since no other interface has ever designed a keyboard like this it is very difficult to use. I am assured by my PSP buddies that you get used to it. So anyway the idea...it goes like this. Imagine an elastic band...If you were to break the band and put it in a single line and then you were to fix one end...then no matter how or where you pulled the unfixed end...it would always come back towards the fixed position.

That is the principle behind my idea. Rather than having to press the right, left, up and down buttons to navigate the interface they should fix the buttons in such a way that clicking to any direction AND HOLDING takes the user to that key...they can then do the necessary keypresses to get to the correct letter. No sooner do they let go...it should spring back to the middle key.

The R and L keys should of course be back and forth...with the rest of the keys remaining the same. I have no idea how it would work in practice...or whether something like this already exists. The drawbacks to this concept would of course be that there are no diagonal keys on the PSP and so it might prove to be slightly difficult to key in an upper right for example without extra effort.