I’m terrible at Photoshop

Especially when I’m in a hurry.  So I said I’d do a mock up of my “Perfect Gadget.” Well, not only am I terrible at combining images, but I felt like I should subject you all to my “Frankenstein.”  I’m know there are some amazing Photoshop artists out there who could run with this idea and turn it into a thing of beauty – but alas I don’t know any of those folks, so here it is:

Just imagine one of these facing out from underneath the screen area:

And that’s it.  I actually went to the Goodwill today to see if they had any broken X-Box controllers just so I’d have something to play around with and make a physical mock-up, but that ended up a bust.  I did happen to stop into a hobby store and their modelling clay was 25% off, so I got some just to see if I could do something with that, but my artistic talent is next to null, so I won’t hold my breath on that one, LOL.

Update Jan 20, 2008:

Well I played around with the modelling clay and I’m no sculptor either – LOL. I’m having much better luck just sketching it out in pencil. but it comes off looking extraordinarily flat, and for some reason it ended up looking a lot like a miniaturized “clam-shell” style iMac Laptop, which I always thought was kind of an ugly design – bleh… Maybe I’ll get my scanner hooked up and share those drawings eventually. Oh, and one other thing I’d enlarge the controller a bit – probably more like the original X-Box controller, not shrink the screen down to the controller’s size. 

Update: Jan. 21, 2008

Ok, well here’s a slightly better PS rendition…  Not a lot better, but a little bit – the mini-keypads represent a 10-key(R) and F-Key(L) banks:

Actually I’d probably evenly distribute the ports along all sides of the device so it wouldn’t look quite so ugly nor interfere with certain modes of operation (like using the camcorder)… And of course the sense of proportion is all wrong.  In the end the target gadget size would be about 6-8″ square and 3″ tall…

One more Update: June 23, 2008

Ok, so this unit is so close it hurts!  It’s the Samsung Q1 “Ultra Premium” All it really needs to be “perfect” would be a nicer front facing video camera, backlit thumb pads, GPS and bluetooth, and a “multi-card reader” (esp. SDHC). Maybe a few other tweaks here-n-there, but oh so close…

[Edit: Aug. 7, 2009]  Another update to the Q1 – keeps getting better!