How About A Round Keypad?

We've written about Digit Wireless before, and their "hills and valleys" concept of putting full letter keypad buttons on a mobile phone by placing them in the spaces between the typical number buttons on a phone keypad. The system works by understanding the surrounding buttons you may press accidentally in an attempt to push the required letter - and responds accordingly. It's a cool concept and appears to finally be coming to market on a few phones. However, they're not the only ones experimenting with alternative keypad setups to fit in letter keys. InfoSync has an article (and a picture) of a new circular keypad layout that attempts to get all the letters into the small area allowed on a mobile phone. This one is made by a company named Gabrielor, and looks interesting. The keypad is based on the idea that our attention is drawn to the center of a circle, so more important buttons and letters are placed closer to the center - though the overall layout of the letters is basically in alphabetical order. Of course, like with Digit Wireless, it may be a struggle for Gabrielor to convince handset makers to experiment with their keypad design - so we may not see it on any production phones any time soon.