Glimpse of the iPhone Nano UI

With the announcement of the revolutionary iPhone, Apple showed us the possibilities of a full screen multi-touch interface. We immediately had some noise about possibilities of Apple introducing iPhone Nano and iPhone shuffle, more a joke rather than any serious speculations as the limitation of such a full screen multi-touch interface is that there is a limit on how small the gadget can be. But looks like Apple might have found the solution.

I guess that resulted in some funny illustrations of the iPhone shuffle, like the one seen in the image below, where in with a push of a button, the iPhone shuffle randomly selects the contact from the address book and dials.

Though it was just a joke, it highlighted the difficulty to put such an interface on a small device, as your fingers would end up covering most part of the interface with such a device as small as say even the Nano (shuffle is out of the question).

Based on reports from folks at Unwired View, Apple seems to have found the solution. They have got hold of a patent filed by Apple which seems to suggest that there could indeed be an iPhone Nano, with an operational touch pad on the back side.

This would mean that you can use the full screen of the iPhone Nano (read on the front side) for viewing. When active touch screen on the back side is activated, transparent device controls appear like in the iPhone; a scroll wheel to browse through the song list for music, alphanumeric keypad for making a call or a QWERTY keyboard to type in text messages.

Thus making a multi-touch full screen version of the iPhone Nano a possibility in the near future.

Feel free to post your own ideas or views in the comments below.

[images courtesy of Unwired View & Mac-Essentials]