I was holding my e71 today, and pretending it was an n900 LOL.

But noticed that twirling with my thumb (like you would do a zoom on n900) was very natural, both clockwise and anti clockwise. AND I could do it with 1 hand in portrait mode.

Twirling with my finger was very very unnatural, and required two hands. It felt a bit Harry Potter

Mike C

twirling with stylus was very practical as well.
i had one hand on breakfast spoon and other holding stylus reading the news

lcuk

that really is Dumbledore

I see an accurate double tap as much more appealing than the twirl.

Some people prefer the double tap, but I like the twirl because it can zoom to a very precise level; for instance, just big enough to fit the column of text I'm interested in.

Ya, I hear ya, what I mean by "accurate" double tapping would be just that, the browser being able to recognize that you're tapping a certain column of text, and zoom in on that only. I think some other phones can do this can't they?
The N900 didn't look too accurate with the double taps from the videos I've seen. Maybe the final release will work better

On a different note, I love the way selection is going to work on the new Blackberry Storm 2.
See here: http://photos.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/wp-c...090022_lzn.jpg

It recognizes that you can't be as accurate with your finger over tiny text, but tries to help you out instead of dumbing down your interaction.

I'm a bit worried about double-tap and twirling for zooming: I'm afraid it would break down when the device is swapping intensely (say I just returned to the browser after something memory intensive).
1) I don't trust my gesture not to be interrupted by swapping between first and second tap, causing an unnecessary navigation at the worst possible moment (swapping).
2) when you start twirling you have to scroll the page, dragging into view all those flash animations and whatnot I was trying to look away from. Not a big deal, in the situation I'm describing it would probably trigger swapping as well, and interrupt smooth operation.

I don't mind these options -- I'd likely use them much of the time -- but I want something more explicit to be available as well.

I'd be happy if something as explicit as Blackberry's selection handles could be worked out for zooming. e.g.: something like cropping images in GIMP with huge translucent grab handles at the corners. The rectangle edges can try to stick to paragraph widths and such, so there's no need for pixel perfect accuracy.

I'm not happy with the zoom buttons either -- I want to zoom in a single step to something that would be comfortable for me. Maybe a zooming rectangle as described above can be displayed once you press the zoom-in button, previewing the zoom as it would occur by default, and give the user a short pause during which they can start toying with the grab handles to modify the default zoom. This would also affect zoom out, which would pop a zoom level stack to the previous zoom level instead of just zooming out by some default fraction.

Also, I wonder if double-tap-zoom and twirl-zoom are implemented only for the browser -- that would be a real shame, I want the same zooming mechanisms to be available all over the UI. Does anybody know?

Double-tap to zoom and twirl to zoom are only available in the browser. And while Ovi Maps is built upon the browser, its development team explicitly disabled those functions.

Blimey

double taps, twirls and zooms, maybe its not Harry Potter, but Strictly come dancing

Mike C

Seriously, wtf.