No, I don't.

Once you find out you'll be really worried about future of buttons on our tablets :-)

Adding 2+2, I am already worried...

Hint: Ragnar works on UI design. I met him on a trip to Helsinki once.

If haptics are integrated with the actual UI widgets, then I suppose that haptics might be a substitute for hardware buttons.

But if haptics are anything like a vibrating version of the current "beep-when-the-stylus-touches-the-screen-even-if-you-missed-the-button-by-three-pixels", then I don't think haptics won't be very much better than what we have now.

Not quite. The N800 has been out of stock for ages and EOL for a while now. At the moment, there is no choice.

They are? I really must be a mutant. The point is that the paradigm of using hw buttons for zooming is obsolete. As I said, that's one thing that the iPhone UI does really well.

Nobody wants a clone. But dismissing everything that the iPhone does *just because* it's the iPhone is just dumb.

As if slapping on a miniature keyboard with microscopic keys solves that issue ... Personally, I'm faster on a standard SMS "keyboard" (i. e. numpad with three letters per number key) than on a miniature keyboard, because I can touch type on the former but not on the latter. Yet I wouldn't want to type anything substantial on either. For typing, you need a close-to-fullsize keyboard, period.
That's not an option on the NITs, except as an accessory ... so the real question is not how to input text but how to avoid having to input it: bookmarks, history, auto-completion, predictive typing, voice control and/or recognition, gestures, handwriting recognition, haptic screen ...

If you give the platform a keyboard, everyone (the developers most of all) will think "oh, it's got a keyboard so that's alright then" and no shift from the "like a desktop but smaller" UI paradigm will ever take place.

So you're saying we need to make life miserable for users so they'll invent something to make it easier?!

So, then, you didn't read the rest of my message that addressed that issue completely? (it's up to the designers to provide style guides and reference applications which conform to those style guides, so that they are setting the bar of expectation of the users, to which 3rd party developers must rise and beat if they want their apps to be successful on the platform)

When Nokia provides those style guides and reference applications, such that you don't need a keyboard to do basic tasks, you don't lose the screen while entering text on a virtual keyboard, and such that developers know what the app ecosystem expects of them, then they can take away the existing UI elements. Not before.

That or they have to do a combination of relegating their device to a particular market segment, designing around that segment, and getting someone who can seduce a crowd the way Steve Jobs does to do the introduction and hype for the device.

Anything else is just going to produce a half-usable device that no one is happy with ... and we'll all end up moving to Android and Pandora (both of which, btw, have keyboards).

(and, android doesn't seem to be having a ton of trouble getting people to develop very touchscreen oriented apps while also delivering a keyboard... I think someone's thesis is flawed...)

I wouldn't put it this way but I can certainly see great merit in *forcing* people to think outside the conventional mouse+keyboard+screen box of HCI. That just doesn't work on such a small device and no amount of bandaiding on a keyboard will fix that.

Random Ideas:
- The fullscreen version of the virtual keyboard would be nice enough if it were a mostly transparent layer over the otherwise unmodified screen ...
- Adopt the SMS paradigm and put two characters on one key
- Change [shift] into a [capitalize last letter] key
- Change the key layout depending on application.

I fear the ideas of fast text input on a small device and a QUERTY keyboard, virtual or real, are orthogonal.

I want a few hardware buttons so I don't wear out my touchscreen as it tries in vain to simulate them.

It's almost that simple.