Thread: Can someone tell me why N900 and not Android?
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cb474 is offline cb474
2009-11-02 , 22:03
Posts: 203 | Thanked: 68 times | Joined on Oct 2009
#133
Originally Posted by johnkzin View Post
Not baffling at all.

Touch screens are imprecise. They're good for fat fingers, and broad/continuous gestures. Dpads are good for precise and discrete movements/gestures. Incremental movements of small widgets works very well with a dpad. Touch screens, with inertial scrolling and such, are much better suited for fast movement and selecting large widgets. Incremental or precise movements of small widgets on a touch screen is abysmally annoying and error prone.

Dpads are great companions to a touch screen. The one that's baffling is the HTC Android phones that all pair a trackball with a touch screen (since tiny trackballs, especially on Android where you can't adjust the sensitivity, are suited for fast and imprecise movement, just like touch screens).

Or did you mean the gold color of the dpad? yeah, that's kinda garish.
I didn't mean that I don't see the point of the d-pad in and of itself. You quoted me out of context. People seem to love to do that on this forum. Quote someone out of context, make them appear to say something they didn't say, and then respond to the thing they didn't say. What's the point?

Anyway, I said I didn't see the point of the d-pad, given that the scrunched up keyboard on the Droid is supposed to suck. So is the benefit of the d-pad worth the trade off of having a keyboard that sucks so badly some reviewers are reporting it's better to just give up and use the onscreen keyboard? There are obviously a lot of touch based phones out there now without d-pads that people are happy with. If both a d-pad and a decent keyboard couldn't be squished together into the Droid's form factor, I would have far preferred a good keyboard.