We are developing a Mobile phone platform for my capstone at school and we are looking for a keypad to use. We want it to be something like you would find on a cell phone and a little less lame than the standard square pads available from Digikey, Mouser and Newark.
Any ideas?
The nokia 8310 and 6510 phones had Keypad-PCBs seperate from the mainboard... perhaps this is something you could use?
This is giving away my secrets, but for my project (similar to yours, and I wanted a reasonably good looking keypad), I used a simple 4-pin resistive-type touchscreen. You can get them from online mobile phone repair shops / ebay for a few dollars.
I made up a "virtual" keypad on paper, placed the touchscreen on top, and read the screen resistance values corresponding to each "button"
Not perfect - it's less reliable than actual buttons, and relies on you reading the screen at the right time, as opposed to a keypad where you could implement a (complicated) interrupt method.
Adds a "cool" factor though!
Anyways just another option for you.