NEC's "Latticekey" concept keypad for mobiles
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Mar 18th 2007 5:24AM
posted Mar 18th 2007 5:24AM
NEC was showing off some conceptual stuff at CeBIT this year and when we caught sight of what looked like a mobile phone, we hustled over to get a look. Upon closer inspection what they were actually demonstrating was an keypad interface for a mobile phone. Labelled the "Latticekey Interface," the idea is fairly straightforward: none of the keys on the handset have labels of any type, but once you place you fingers on them, the screen will help guide you to use them for whatever task is at hand. This is actually a pretty slick concept, but sadly it was only that – no hands-on here, folks. We included a pic of the text in the display, as NEC worded it in such a dreamy, Utopian voice.
I've never felt the need to watch video for any article, except this one...
Haha, yeah islisis. What the... how do you use this? You press any button and then the display tells you where you are and where the other buttons are, and then you move your finger to that one and release it? I think that's pretty slow. Maybe a video could convince me (and explain what they thought), but so...
This sounds an awful lot like what's known as "Mystery Meat Navigation" in web design circles, generally considered a Bad Thing.
But like prior commenters said, maybe there's something more to this keypad interface that just doesn't come across in a textual description.
What's the advantage of having unlabelled keys? I really can't imagine any. I'm usually all for new types of device controls but I must say this sounds like a silly gimmick. Weee no key labels! Pretty cool until the next gimmick comes around...
i design phones. the advantage of no labels is ... they can be backlit with numbers, letters, or characters. also, instead of a password that can be broken, you could enter a pattern on the keypad as your password with the numbers mixed up so even if someone looks over your shoulder while doing commerce, they really cannot get your password.