Go through the products available at a site like sparkfun or adafruit and tell me you couldn't make some awesome customization control panel system? Larger buttons for smartphone-specific functions, some with their own small (and low-cost) discrete display perhaps?
A modular control system, featuring 100% plug and play elements (knobs, sliders, mini-displays, buttons) mountable in a range of simple chassis (19"rack, keyboard size, mini desktop box, mixing-console-size control center) that can be configured by a trivial to use piece of software and thereafter control any device (PC, tablet).
I've been wanting this for twenty-five years.
There are things that do some of this, but not very well, and not very cost-effectively. There is software that simulates this on a touchscreen (grr). Anyone fancy a hardware startup?
I realize this probably isn't quite what you want, but have you looked at using MIDI? A lot of modern MIDI gear is quite cheap, connects to your computer over USB, and with the appropriate software can be used to control anything on your computer. There are MIDI devices with just about any kind of physical input you could want - pots, sliders, pedals, buttons, pressure-sensitive pads, optical and sound-based inputs, and much more.
There are a variety of development boards (Livid Brain, uCApps MIDIbox) designed to allow semi-technical users to build their own MIDI controllers. It's also reasonably straightforward to configure an Arduino Micro or a Teensy to work as a USB HID interface. If you can use a soldering iron and a drill, you can build a custom controller.
Absolutely. I've been known to break out the breadboard to that end. But soldering irons and arduinos are a level of too much... erm... wires, for what I'm thinking. Not to mention that making it control what you want takes time and debugging and perhaps a sympathetic operating system or app.
How about forgetting the electronics, and seeing controllers as just another UI problem. Software, implemented in plastic.
What would you want to build if it were that easy? Custom controllers for games? Custom games? MIDI Instruments? Dashboards with physical elements? Home / media center controls? POS interfaces? Hardware usability testing prototypes? Kitchen gadgets?
Maybe I'd be the only market, but I think it would be a big blurring of the line between hacker and maker culture.
I am one of the fools who bought an optimus popularis - it's optimus lame.
Also those relegendable knobs and sliders are very popular in the music industry already 0 - so it would be fairly trivial to bring it to a consumer device.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/22/the-maker-movement-starts-...
Go through the products available at a site like sparkfun or adafruit and tell me you couldn't make some awesome customization control panel system? Larger buttons for smartphone-specific functions, some with their own small (and low-cost) discrete display perhaps?