REMEMBER THAT fancy for crazy paving that blighted gardens and allotments in the 1970s?

You took a broken up paving slab, acquired through non-specific means and often via the local council, and chucked it onto the earth to create a sort of ad hoc pathway. It was cheap, cheerful and very dangerous on the old ankles.

Anyhow, Research In Motion engineers seem to recall it well and the trend seems to have inspired a new keyboard design that could make it to the BlackBerry. A patent filed by the Canadians shows the design, and the filing was picked up by News.com. As you can see, it looks a bit like crazy paving or, more charitably, parquet flooring laid by an amateur.

The claim is described thus:

"Wireless handheld mobile communication device including a housing with a display above a keyboard exposed for user actuation. A length of the device is greater than the width. Each key of a right-hand keyfield has a longitudinal axis oriented at a left-to-right inclined angle while each key of a left-hand keyfield has a longitudinal axis oriented at a right-to-left inclined angle from the vertical centerline. A left boundary of the keyboard is located adjacent the left lateral side edge of the device and the right boundary of the keyboard is located adjacent the right lateral side edge of the device so that the keyboard spans a substantial entirety of the width of the device."

Like we said, a bit like crazy paving.

But RIM will be dicing with danger if it changes the format without keeping the classic Qwerty chiclet keyboard line -- that's an indelible classic. µ