If one had to select a vendor that is the most active in experimenting with various input devices for the mobile phone, Samsung would be clearly ahead of the pack.

It already has devices with a least 7 different navigation/inputs on the market:

• full touchscreen Samung P520 Armani,
• touchscreen/QWERTY keyboard on Samsung Vodafone F700v,
• dual QWERTY keyboard/numeric keypad on Samsung F520 Ultra Smart,
• innovative click wheel on Samsung F310 B&O Serenata music phone,
• optical mouse on Samsung i780,
• optical joystick on Samsung V960 ,
• trackball on Samsung i550 GPS phone…

And now we’ve got another interesting input device - touchpad for mobile phone:

Disclosed in a patent application called “Touchpad-based input system and method for portable device” it is able to recognize touch gliding movements in horizontal, vertical and scewed directions, sense the pressure, clicks and manipulate on screen images accordingly.

Touchpad can be used to manipulate both cursor and various on-screen objects (e.g pictures, icons, maps) as well.