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Posts: 177 | Thanked: 43 times | Joined on Apr 2008 @ Gainesville, FL
#411
Originally Posted by Karel Jansens View Post
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...
Hmmm, unassailable breakdown. Well, I completely agree with you regarding the ease of input that comes with a well implemented hardware keyboard. Now, I'm not sure, as in I have not used, a thumbsized keyboard for anything serious, so I'm not sure how convinced I am of it's utility in the larger scheme of things, say when I'd like to use the IT as a laptop replacement. I guess, if I were to be completely honest, I'd like to see Nokia implement a "profile" manager, with a "lightweight" profile comprising a finger driven UI(and perhaps the majority of the functions accessible in this profile would be PMP functions), a "welterweight" profile comprising a stylus driven UI (menus galore, options by the thousands), and a "heavyweight" profile which assumes that you have a keyboard (bluetooth) and intend to use the IT as a laptop replacement.