Thread: future NIT form factor - Dpads?
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fallenguru is offline fallenguru
2008-09-29 , 23:49
Posts: 10 | Thanked: 2 times | Joined on Jan 2007
#56
Originally Posted by SD69 View Post
The 810 version was just a different version for people with different preferences.
Not quite. The N800 has been out of stock for ages and EOL for a while now. At the moment, there is no choice.

Originally Posted by SD69 View Post
The other keys [zoom+][switchview][zoom-] ... are placed where the thumb and forefinger rest.
They are? I really must be a mutant. The point is that the paradigm of using hw buttons for zooming is obsolete. As I said, that's one thing that the iPhone UI does really well.

Originally Posted by SD69 View Post
The NIt should aspire to [be] better than the iphone not to imitate it.
Nobody wants a clone. But dismissing everything that the iPhone does *just because* it's the iPhone is just dumb.

Originally Posted by johnkzin View Post
If you only have a touch screen, then you're forced to solve certain problems in a manner that may not be actually be optimal, nor even close to optimal, for that form of input. For example, virtual keyboards -- a touchscreen implementation for solving the "how do I create text input", yet it's an incredibly poor way to implement that goal.
As if slapping on a miniature keyboard with microscopic keys solves that issue ... Personally, I'm faster on a standard SMS "keyboard" (i. e. numpad with three letters per number key) than on a miniature keyboard, because I can touch type on the former but not on the latter. Yet I wouldn't want to type anything substantial on either. For typing, you need a close-to-fullsize keyboard, period.
That's not an option on the NITs, except as an accessory ... so the real question is not how to input text but how to avoid having to input it: bookmarks, history, auto-completion, predictive typing, voice control and/or recognition, gestures, handwriting recognition, haptic screen ...

If you give the platform a keyboard, everyone (the developers most of all) will think "oh, it's got a keyboard so that's alright then" and no shift from the "like a desktop but smaller" UI paradigm will ever take place.