One of the biggest remaining problems with the Apple iPhone (and presumably any Apple touch screen device) is the fact that one cannot touch type on the system. You must watch the keyboard as you type.

My idea is to make a plastic overlay (similar to a plastic screen protector)

Specialized cling plastic overlays can be made for special purposes (i.e. not just the QUERTY) keyboard and they can be interchanged.

This allows Apple (and others) to manufacture touch-screen devices with perfectly smooth glass and allows us to customize the “feel” of these devices to our own tastes.

Note: I originally came up with this idea September 2008. You see the dated picture. I revealed the idea to the University of Michigan Tech transfer folks September 22, 2008 – and they were not interested. I asked Apple if there were interested in any ideas without revealing the idea and their policy is not to accept anything like this from customers. I left the text(above) on my desktop for a while wondering if I could patent it myself – but just got bored and decided to clean up my desktop and post it here. Really I just want such a product to exist so I stop hating my iPhone’s keyboard.

I originally wrote this blog post in MoveableType and then converted it to WordPress – here is my Original blog post before I converted to WordPress.