Re: What woud you realistically like to see in the N900?
 

"ascii" "keyboard"? ;)

Re: What woud you realistically like to see in the N900?
 

sorry - qwerty!

Although .. I guess it is an ascii keyboard too!

Re: What woud you realistically like to see in the N900?
 

I get your idea. Sounds good. :D Seems possible now we are seeing more and more of that in the desktop environment.

I know 'qwerty' is well entrenched and familiar to many, and I found 'fitaly' quicker but it did require some 'learning curve', so-to-speak.
I do like the pen for input and the tablet does indeed focus there, they just need to refine the 'recognition' to be more natural. Its already been demonstrated as possible on other platforms. Format of a Tablet, the pen is still highly instinctive for many people with that premise of a 'tablet'.


I know I might be dreaming a little on Voice options, but hey, I have seen an example of sorts in Voice Navigate on Palm a while back.

Just opening a thought to input refinement... outside of the simplified finger input styles that are emerging most recently.

Re: What woud you realistically like to see in the N900?
 

I was told in so many words by a Nokia employee (Roope Rainisto) that Nokia does not consider a stylus-based interface as the way to go ahead with the Itablets. Here:

http://tabletui.wordpress.com/2008/0...myth/#comments

(Look for comment # 7)

That was basically my cue to no longer consider Nokia's tablets as something for future interest (a nice way to say I won't be buying another one. Ever again), as I consider finger-driven interfaces (the only other logical path to follow) as something for gadgets, not computers.

Re: What woud you realistically like to see in the N900?
 

Just so long as it's not an EBCDIC keyboard. You need some huge freaking hands to reach across the gaps between "I" & "J" and "R" & "S" while typing. Stupid design.

Re: What woud you realistically like to see in the N900?
 

Why does a finger-driven interface preclude the device's use as a computer? Or rather, what do you do with a stylus on your tablet that raises it to the level of a computer that you wouldn't or couldn't do in a finger driven interface?

Re: What woud you realistically like to see in the N900?
 

A handwritten interface.

I must admit, 10 years past the introduction of the Newton 2x00 it is unbelievable how not only has portable computing failed to move forwards, it has taken huge strides backwards in many ways.

Re: What woud you realistically like to see in the N900?
 

When you say handwritten interface, are you referring primarily to handwriting recognition for text entry? (I'm assuming you are ....correct me) and saying that this is advantageous because of increased input speed, ease of use....? I didn't get to use the Newton (before my time), and I haven't used the handwriting capabilities of my NIT, so I'm honestly at a lost as to the killer app that comes with the stylus and/or a handwriting interface.

Re: What woud you realistically like to see in the N900?
 

If you make a small computer-like device, you can go three ways:

1) Make it keyboard-centric, in which case you're basically going to produce a Psion (or a Pandora -- hehe); the clamshell design has (for the user, that is) several clear advantages, such as compactness, built-in screen protection and recognizeability. The user interface can be great (Psion's SIBO and EPOC are simply marvelous) or quite stupid (the Wince crowd), but simple text entering will always be quite straightforward. The reason I preferred Psion's offerings to Wincies, is that Psions have always been real, standalone computers, which allowed the user to do everything he could do on his Big Box.

2) You could decide to make a tablet, and then the user interface suddenly becomes very important: A tablet cannot be interacted with in the same way as a keyboarded computer, at least not without invoking serious frustration from the user. There have been two good tablet interfaces sofar: Palm and Newton. Palms however were always designed as computer companions, not primary devices; the Newton OTOH was designed from the ground up as a stylus-operated, handwriting-centric main computer.

3) The thrid choice is to make a content-serving device, or what is basically known as a PMP. There's gazillions of them around and they're quite good at serving up content, but pretty lousy at actually processing stuff.

It seems to me Nokia tried to market a PMP as a portable computer...

Re: What woud you realistically like to see in the N900?
 

Maybe it's my complete lack of imagination, but when I look at the clumsy, big UI-elements of finger driven devices (and this includes those absurdly big menus and scrollbars in OS2008), I don't see how they could efficiently handle menus and dialogues with lots of options.

Somthing like XChat, for example, with its sub-menus and 100 options... it's hard for me to imagine how a finger-driven UI could handle all this without breaking it down into even more sub-menus and sub-sub-windows/tabs, thus making it totally unusable.

(But, as I said, maybe it's just my lack of imagination. Surprise me with something that works. I still wouldn't use it because I hate finger taps on my screen, but it'd be interesting to see.)