tso,
I find the screen and everything nice - liqbase manages to refresh the screen MUCH faster than anything else and I sketch and doodle all the time.

The screen is pressure sensitive and as long as you update it fast enough it works perfectly.

ok, maybe i have just not found the right program then...

Maybe there's still no answer to this question. When the Nokia 770 came out it was unique and something completely new on the market. Now three years later the world looks different and people stopped looking at NITs at weird angles because they got used to the idea of tablets thanks to the UMPC and iPhone hype. But still, what is it for? Nokia claims the N800 and N810 are internet tablets (the same was claimed for the 770). Many users however use it for more, so it becomes some kind of laptop replacement (again, the same was already true for the 770). So, did anything change?

The thing that really changed was the UI. When the 770 arrived, it had a completely stylus-driven UI. This is no surprise because the closest relatives to the tablets where PDAs at that time. Nobody ever thought of controlling their PDAs solely with fingers.
But as time evolved, people found out that the new use cases of the NITs are often better controlled with fingers. Nokia must have noticed this and started some finger-friendliness experiments in OS 2007.
I think if they want to go to mass market with a device that isn't a PDA, and less capable than a UMPC, a finger-friendly UI is essential. Not because of the iPhone, but because "mass market" means non-geeks, and many non-geeky people would never accept a geeky stylus that could easily be lost and needs to be pulled out first.

A good finger-friendly UI could be used with a stylus as well. But I think that before discussing about the
proper UI for the NITs, everyone should find an answer to the question of what NITs actually are good for herself/himself.
I think the user base will always be split into two parties: "internet tablet users" who love it simple and want to touch with fingers, and "pocket computer users" who want a real desktop on their tablet and use a stylus as mouse replacement.

For myself, I found out that I rather am a "internet tablet user". This might have to do with the fact that I use computers most of the time for system administration and software development. In my opinion, doing these sorts of things is really awkward on the tiny screen and with the built-in keyboard. OK, I could use a BT keyboard, but then I would have to carry a lot of stuff around, and I could use the eeePC as well (because the keyboard is built-in).
All other tasks like web surfing, multimedia, book reading, games are well handled by my NITs. But those don't require a real desktop. The tablet 2008 UI is good for this kind of stuff.


The same here, but with different use cases. It replaces my PC for web browsing and checking mail.

I seldom use my phone for webbrowsing or anything other than phone, calendar, and contacts. The webbrowser on my windows mobile phone is crappy. And that's what I have a NIT for.

Yeah, I fully agree. But is the latter UI a responsibility of Nokia? The community has already ported great desktops to the NIT (gnome, icewem, kde, enlightenment, xfce, windowmaker) so maybe the "micro-laptop" UI is already there and Nokia can fully concentrate on a mass market compatible "internet tablet" UI.

A crappy UI is one that doesn't fit your use cases. Of course OS 2008 is crappy for the micro-laptop use case.

pycage,
How do you use your finger for browsing?
Its not like you can comfortably slide the page around with your finger pad (ala iphone), the display does not react properly, and your finger pad is too big to grab the scrollbar.

Unless you are confusing finger browsing with fingernail use (which is just a short stylus) I cannot see how it works well.
It could be that I've just got a crappeh screen and its entirely possible to do full touch stuff with it.


I see finger friendly as in large touch pads for menu interaction - the main maemo app menu has it pretty much right, the iphone has it and liqbase has similar.
it "works" on many levels for menu systems to simply give as much screen estate as possible to ui elements and make it easy to touch without aiming.

It fails at other things though like the bookmarks list - which wants to be finger friendly but just makes finding things a slow slug through the list.

Careful what you wish for.

The trackpads on IBM (Lenovo) T series laptops are notorious for their touchiness. On my previous T43 I'd just get near the thing with a thumb and suddenly files are vanishing... images are randomly edited... porn popups are proliferating...

Well, I'm fine with both finger friendly and stylus friendly. And honestly it's easy to program both into a UI. I've already done it in small scale on some other projects. I realize why some want finger friendly, as it saves them the time of working with the stylus, while others want screen realestate and don't mind the stylus.

The way we solved that was to have what was called the "fat menus" and the "thin menus". Fat menus were for people who wanted a finger friendly interface. It had larger icons, larger text, and operated differently on the screen. The thin menus used midget icons, small text, and was very stylus friendly. And it was easy to program in on a system wide, and application wide basis, and adjustable from the control panel.

The only question after that is if Nokia is willing to do it.

In my opinion what's called for here is a revolutionary approach that throws old paradigms out the window and starts from scratch. Some time back we had that discussion here but unfortunately it seemed to have ultimately gone nowhere.

I want to forget conventional menus, zooming, scrolling, etc, and come up with an approach that is specifically designed around the tablets' capabilities. That means, IMO, increased usage of gestures and decreased emphasis on things like dropdown menus. Long clicks, finger motions, multitaps, etc. I'll take heat for this from traditionalists I know but something that borrows heavily from Canola, iPhone and other similar approaches.

Out with the old.

In with the new.

The feature was in the OS for a while, and vanished in Chinook.

Texrat,

liqbase is doing all of those things, I've started from a completely blank page and I'm seeing what works and what doesn't.

Part of me just nosying around and trying to code up what I've had in my head for years.
I've been forced to rethink everything since nothing is available for me already, its been interesting so far to see the work involved in building a UI from scratch.

I was just going to try to whip up a test program using this, but then I remembered my touchscreen is completely broken and I am about to send my device in for repair It will be quite a while before I can do any programming that needs testing on a device.