Seabird: A Mozilla Labs Concept Series Phone
By now, the stories around the web are far and wide on the new Mozilla concept phone called Seabird. If you've not read, you can see it on the following link: https://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/2010/09/23/seabird/ 
It uses Android (but only looks like Eclair; would like some Froyo love to make it look more modern), and has some interesting things, such as the concept of dual pico projectors for keyboards.
While these both look cool and will undoubtedly give you awesome bragging rights to anyone you showed this to, I'm not sure exactly how comfortable these will be to use. Soft keyboards (touch-based, software keyboards) have a problem of usually being too small, and the fact that your finger covers the keys, but the problems on a projector-based keyboard is that it removes Haptic feedback (something that comes in handy on nearly any type of touch screen), and that the surface it's on will still be entirely flat (depending on what it's on). Also, it has problems with camera input, in that it's capable of multitouch (it uses a basic camera, after all), but it has trouble differentiating between fingers if one goes in front of the other. For the upper picture (split keyboard), I can see overlapping fingers being a real problem. Of course the software developers can just go the Xbox Kinect route and develop fingers as bone structures and try to internally render where it believes the fingers to be touching.
For most words, it won't be a problem. But if we get words that use multiple keys on a single line, such as sad, agree, typewriter, among others, will become quite annoying, and force users to make exaggerated movements when typing (those who employ a two-finger typing scheme - a slower typing scheme - will ironically be least affected by this technology constraint, I'm guessing).
I think that Pico-based keyboards need their own input style also, similar to the concept of Swype (using a gesture to trace a word's path on a keyboard). The projector could map out the path (even offer a line trailing the finger). The good thing about using this type of soft keyboard is that the keyboard size and way it functions can change on the fly, and offer word suggestions as part of the projector (instead of using valuable screen real-estate for such things).
However, my big problem is seeing a full version of Windows 7 running the Firefox browser coming out of a projector. I'm not sure if that's an RDC client running through the phone or what, but it's a tad unreasonable to assume it could run a fully-blown OS like Windows alongside Android on a phone.
While that's certainly a nice looking phone, I don't like that it has a Mini-USB and not Micro-USB. Mini-USB is the past, whereas Micro-USB is the future, is thinner, and much more durable.
Look how sexy the right one is, in comparison.
Another thing that I'm not so sure about is how top-heavy it looks. The bottom of it looks rounded, and therefore unstable when on a flat surface. Also, it doesn't seem to be the most comfortable of devices when reaching for the top-half of the screen (something Android users tend to do quite an amount, with the slide-screen notification bar at the top).
Still, the concept is cool and it's amazing to see what geeks with a certain kind of passion and finesse for design can create. Certainly, go and look at the video posted on the site, and tell me what you think.
