Thread: Where is Nokia - no announcement no product - still in hibernation
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SD69 is offline SD69
2009-01-11 , 20:13
Posts: 1,513 | Thanked: 2,248 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ US
#197
Originally Posted by ragnar View Post
To take a stupid analogy, if you have a hammer, you will find plenty of things that look like nails. If you bolt a hammer on the side of the device, you would get frustrated if there wouldn't be nails to hit.

Then again, I'm arguing here in generalities. The N810 has no D-pad on the front cover. Any future device might or might not have such a key.

For instance the Palm Pre skips the D-pad with a separate touch scrolling and gesture area, giving capabilities like page up/down, launching new items etc. All very nice. The touch pad a nice idea because if there is nothing else for it to do, it does (afaik) exactly the same thing as another parts of the touch screen. Meaning that there are no extra functions the designers have to invent just for functions sake.
I think there are plenty of present and future uses for the D-pad if it is present.

In addition to the demonstrated Palm Pre, there is already a MID shipping with a separate gesture area for zooming. If replacing the D-pad with an improved off-screen HW element, it should at least be equivalent functionally and appear exactly the same way in the SW stack for at least apps developers. When we talk about about a HW "key", I think we are referring to an offscreen HW element manipulatable with one finger without covering up the display. For example, you referred to the Apple UI, but zooming is carried out by multi-touch of the display itself. I do prefer the Palm Pre to that.
 

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