New Arc soft keyboard may be coming to Windows Phone 8

More than a year ago we reported on Microsoft designing a “one handed and next gen soft keyboard” for Windows Phone 8.

We now have a picture of the keyboard in question, courtesy of a leaked Microsoft Research presentation.

The keyboard is designed for one-handed thumb typing without having to look and features several keys clustered together, leveraging disambiguation to decide what word is in fact being typed.

The change would be Microsoft’s  most radical change to the Western SIP yet, and is reminiscent of the curved keyboards found in the old Microsoft UMPCs.

Apollo will also bring extended national Soft Keyboards including a new Korean design.

Seeing the keyboard demoed on a HTC Trophy of course also gives us hope this will in fact also be coming to Windows Phone 7.8.