These are things I think should be _rotatable_ (usable in both portrait and landscape):


1) The system "list of items" widget should be rotatable, so that you can use it in portrait mode (more items visible = faster browsing through the list, less width = less detail per item) OR landscale mode (more detail per item, but fewer items visible).

This definitely applies to Contacts, Media Player (audio or not; portait - just the list of titles/artists/tracks, landscape - include the cover art), buddy list IM, conversation list in IM/SMS, MAYBE the IM/SMS messages themselves (until you go to compose one), and if there is a list/menu driven version of the application launcher (like the application menus in older versions of Maemo).

2) Media Player for audio controls

3) Rhapsody, if there's still going to be a dedicated Maemo app, should have a portrait mode. Basically, same use case as Media Player.

4) Skype. Same use case as the basic phone functionality of Maemo 5. Same with other VOIP apps. It's ok if video-calls are landscape only, but audio calls should be rotatable between portrait and landscape.

5) Document Viewers. All of them should be able to display in either mode. Those that allow editing, I can see only doing editing in landscape. But viewing should be doable either way. That applies to web pages as well (web browser should be rotatable).

6) task/todo list (I suppose this sort of fits into item #1, but I wanted to call it out). Edit items in landsacpe, view in landscape or portrait.

7) Calendar (event list and day view should be rotatable, but perhaps not week view nor month view, which I can see as being landscape only)

8) simple calculator view (but advanced calculator in landscape; in fact, on the iPhone, rotation is how you select simple vs advanced calculator modes, there's no other widget for it that I'm aware of).

9) added since I posted in the other topic: the screen saver mode should be viewable in either orientation, IMO. Not like desktop "colliding galaxy" screen savers, but like cell phone style screen savers that show you that you have X unread messages, X unread emails, X unread IMs, X% battery left, X missed calls, X voice mails, X bars of signal, which carrier you're on, etc. THAT status screen should be viewable in both portrait and landscape.


.....


in contrast, there are things that I am fine with only having a landscape mode:

a) IM/SMS/Email message composing

b) text editors (memo editor, plain text file editor), and probably editor modes of document viewers. Really, anything that you KNOW is going to be heavily driven by text entry is probably going to be ok to have a landscape only restriction (so, in a way, that covers the previous item too). And, I think with the revelation that they aren't planning to have a portrait mode virtual keyboard, this makes perfect sense.

c) Xterm (I'd hate to have curses based sessions constantly being messed with by rotation, and the canonical terminal dimensions, 80x24, are definitely wider than they are tall) ... with xterm, it's not just that it's text input driven, it's that it's a fixed width text grid. Sure, you can re-size an xterm on a regular display, but you don't generally see people doing that frequently -- they pick their preferred window geometry, and keep it. I've never seen someone re-orient it in the middle of a curses driven application, for example. That would just be ... disorienting, and probably create visual clutter. So, for me: xterm = landscape only.

d) VNC viewer -- some might make the case for it in portrait mode, but I doubt I'd ever use it that way. And I definitely want it to have landscape mode.

e) movie/tv-show/video viewing from a local file (not flash on webpages, as it would probably be too complicated to force some web pages into landscape, while allowing others to be portrait or landscape). Even low-def/non-wide-screen video needs 480 pixels of width... Though, I suppose if it's a specialized video that is narrower than 480 pixels, that'd be fine... but what's the point in catering to that special case?


I think that's it... I think probably most other things are things about which I'd be agnostic. And I can't think of any application that should be "portrait mode only" (not even the phone dialer).