iPhone is sleek, but the candybar form factor doesn’t appeal everyone. Apple needs a variety of form factors before they can dream of taking over the phone industry. Recent "dual sided trackpad" patent filed by Apple talks about one such possibility – flip phone or cam shell.
The patent illustrates a design, which separates the display and the capacitive touch sensor array into two units. The touch sensor array is actually a translucent (or perhaps transparent) panel, which is touch-sensitive on both sides. The two units are connected with a hinge. When you close the device, the transparent touch panel is covering the display unit, and can be used as an ordinary iPhone. Unwired View has some Photoshop mockups of the patent:
PS: Yeah, even I am drooling over the sexiness of the design.

wrote, on March 19th, 2008
Ah no way! This is going to be sweet! I love flip phones better anyway because you don’t scratch the important bits as often.
wrote, on March 20th, 2008
That is a sleek design! Apple can always think of something.
wrote, on March 20th, 2008
Apple are the Daddies when it comes to design. Nothing else touches them at the minute.
Would like to try out the iPhone but O2 contracts are just so expensive (in my humble opinion!)
wrote, on March 25th, 2008
i’m staring at my nokia n70, hell i want that iPhone too!
wrote, on March 26th, 2008
Very cool. I have had no interest in iPhones thus far, but this would definitely make me think twice about that decision. Looking at it, I figured the clear part would be useless, or some kind of plastic cover…but then I saw they had numbers on it, so apparently not.
wrote, on April 6th, 2008
Simply stunning though it’s pretty hard to see how well it’ll work from those pictures.
I guess only time will tell.
wrote, on April 27th, 2008
You’ve gotta love publicly viewable documents. I might actually get an i-phone if they follow through with this idea — looks cool as all hell.
wrote, on July 13th, 2008
this is quite idiotic!!!!! who is going to want an additional touch piece on an already touch phone!!!! This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of. So a way for Apple to sell more phones is to make their phone bigger? Wow how funny is that?