what if you took the form factor of the rabbit R1 "ai" doohickey and made a phone like that
- squarish, with a rectangular screen on the left. shrink the bezels compared to the R1 to get a bit more screen estate. (it looks big in pictures but they're doing trickery by using black backgrounds for everything)
- use the scroll wheel to scroll. could be a rocker switch instead? could you make a way to "click" it?
- fuck it, trackball? then you could assign actions to up, down, left, right, quick swipes...
- speaker around to the front side, ideally
- I think move the charging port to the top or bottom centre? my first thought was bottom left but good luck holding it left handed.
- if you vertically centred the scroll wheel it'd all still work for a leftie, except for selfie photos needing to rotate the device on it's side
thoughts inspired by this video https://youtu.be/iDlM0cYS9Zs
okay but what if i mocked it up. this is a bit under 10×10cm, with a 9.3×7cm screen (bezels would actually be a bit bigger than this I think). maybe a little smaller?
if I hold something behind it to make it about 2cm thick, it's quite comfortable to hold! I can see why the R1 put the scroll wheel up higher, but I want this vertically symmetric so it can be used left handed by rotating it 180° (even if doing so messes up the camera placement). you'd want to weight it to the right side.
i think a small trackpad instead of a scroller. clicky so you can either click in for an action, or click up or down to turn a page on an ereader app. then could also program gestures for side swipes (probably just back) and maybe have it double as a fingerprint reader
USB port centre left, although it'd be cool to have two of them. maybe top and middle? it's on the left so you could in theory plug accessory modules into it like a keyboard? throw some magnets on that side too for stuff like that.
i put the speaker grille above the scroll pad. front facing so you can hear it well, and it's a decent enough spot if you wanted to hold it to your head for a call. i thought it would be neat to click it for a mute switch but the grille might get gross. microphone would be bottom left to make calling ergonomics work.
a button would work well on top of the camera, but not leftie friendly, so can't be critical functionally. could just be a shutter button? and then power button on the right next to the camera? since this thing is I imagine about 2cm thick, you could have a power button and a physical mute switch next to each other. or one below the other, physical mute literally next to the speaker.
