Routon P760 and P730 Android MID

Android or generic Linux (Mer opportunity?)

+ Dpad and buttons on the face (of both units)

? The P760 has a 12 key number pad on the face. With letters... makes me wonder if you can use it for T9 style text entry on the device. That could be an interesting way to do input on it. Otherwise, I'm sure exactly why you'd want _just_ a number pad on a MID.

- At 4.8" of screen real estate, and looking at the device's proportions in the picture, I have to wonder if it's actually pocketable or not. But at least it's 800x480, as opposed to the GiiNii Mini's lesser resolution.

that's one ugly keypad. i guess you could use it for short cuts or something besides t9.

correction that's one ugly device and a bad formfactor - keypad only adds unnecessary bulk

crazy chinese making crazy devices that may never show up anywhere...

This one made UMPCPortal today. Has a picture of both models (with and without the 12 key number pad).

Supposed to ship in May.

That is an awful, awful design, possibly the worst designed portable/pocket device I've ever seen. It's like they just got a load of mobile device design options and threw them together at random, without any thought for how they would work in one unit.

The keypad makes the device physically larger while restricting how big the screen can be.

The keypad is positioned really stupidly, in such a way that it would be difficult to operate with one hand. The whole point of keypads on mobile devices is to let you enter text or numbers with one hand, but that has been completely ignored by this design.

The keypad also makes it difficult to reach the screen with your right thumb if you're holding it in two hands.

And because it's numerical it won't help with software that requires QWERTY.

It's got a touchscreen, why didn't they just use a virtual keypad and keyboard? That would have let them extend the screen or shrink the device, and would have made access to the screen easier...

You should specify, since your criticisms only apply two ONE of the TWO models.

How do you feel about the one that DOESN'T have the number pad?

a) I could easily use that number pad with just my right hand on the device.

b) if it has T9 type input, then it would work just fine for MOST text input. No QWERTY required.

Because virtual keyboards suck ***.


All of that said... I don't like the P760 either. I think it can work, but I wouldn't choose it over other designs (not even over it's own cousin, the P730). But I do like that they have a Dpad. I could see the P730 maybe being viable.

Ah, sorry about that!

Well as it wasn't illustrated in the article it's a bit difficult to comment on the other one, but yes I was referring to the one WITH the keypad... :-)

If you take the keypad off completely then the design problems are pretty much resolved, and you have a standard touchscreen tablet-style device.



Yes, but it would be easier to do so if the keypad wasn't attached to one side of the device.

If you use it one-handed you're going to have the weight of the other side constantly dragging down on the left, which is a very bad design.