Or enable what you do need.

Yeah, seriously. When I am walking around and I need to do something quick on the screen, I very much prefer to have one hand free just in case. That's the reason I chose a E71 over an iPhone (and why I didn't end buying a N97): because I can use it decently with one hand, and very speedy with two hands. The situation is different when I am sitting in my house, then I could spring out the keyboard.

Another reason: around here in the third world (a market Nokia likes) there are plenty of people waiting to snatch your phone and run away. Common targets are people that have their two hands busy. And I feel my phone safer when I grab it fully with my hand (I have big hands, though). When I carry something with two hands, it is very easy to grab the phone by the middle and snatch it away.

And finally, and tbh, I find the N97 keyboard....not so good compared to the E71's.

You know what the problem is? That users will want to have that mode anyway, regardless of it seems difficult or not. It is understandable that there were priorities in the development of the N900, but at least more portrait support should be considered in the roadmap of software upgrades of the N900. Then you can tell the users "we don't have it now, but we will have it in XX months".

As I said, in the N97, I don't have the prettiest solution, nor the best on-screen keyboard (T9 ugh), but at least I have something. Very different from not having it at all. If we can get at least it (maybe borrowing from the phone as you mention), then great. Something is something!

Just an idea, and I don't know if this will go over well, but....

How about a completely different desktop layout in portrait mode?
I mean: different contacts, different backgrounds, different widgets, the works.

This idea came from watching all of the n900 videos, where all the home screens for most of the users are already cluttered - this would give users 8 home screens to work with instead of 4. It would also let users arrange things as they want in either mode, since the widgets don't transfer anyway.
The *big* downside: If users want to access some widget they put in a landscape-orientation while holding the phone in portrait mode, they will have to rotate the phone, which will get kind of annoying after the first couple of times.

OR

When the phone is switched to portrait mode for the first time (or landscape mode for the first time), all the desktop widgets lose their positions and clutter at the bottom of the screen (annoying, I know). The user is then given an option on each thumbnail to "lock" its position in that location (kind of like drag-lock, but more location based). That way, say I wanted a widget in the upper left corner in both portrait and landscape orientation. I would just move it there in landscape and rotate the phone and "lock" it in place in portrait. It would be annoying the first time, but from then on out, the desktop would look like I wanted it to. This would solve the problem of making the software figure out where to put widgets and instead leave that choice to the user (and that's what we're all about, isn't it?).
The *slightly smaller* downside: widgets that span the whole screen in landscape will not work well at all. Widgets even slightly bigger than the width of the screen in portrait mode will break it. Possible solution: a toggle that would make such widgets automagically "hide" in portrait mode.

A "tweak" to the last solution I proposed: instead of having the widgets lose positions, the software could *attempt* to reorient them and indicate to the user that the layout is a temporary one that they can tweak and customize. I know quite a few people that wouldn't bother changing the order of the widgets around. It would also give a more polished "feel" to the rotation and not give the user a "darn, now why did I do that" sort of moment when the icons lose position.

Just throwing that out there...

Thanks Elimoon8, that is already a bit more sensible. Separate free layouts for portrait and landscape would already solve some parts of the layout puzzle. It doesn't yet solve the wallpaper (which also could be separate for both), or very wide widgets like the Mauku widget (where resizing would need to happen).

In general, as Konttori also said: yes we're actively working on increasing portrait mode support. Perhaps I could chat with Quim over how much of that roadmap we could share already.

Yes, half.

And, I realized the analogy was absurd, but I couldn't think of a good one, so I just rolled with it. I still think it made the point though ... while the stated N97 style of home-screen rotation may not be ideal, it's better than no home-screen rotation at all, IMO (and apparently in the opinions of other people here). But, what I was replying to came across as "we don't like the N97 style of home-screen rotation, so we didn't give you home-screen rotation at all".


While, I do recognize that there are cases where something that is half-done, especially in a user interface, can be worse than doing nothing at all ... but it sounds like the N97 style was good enough for Nokia to ship it, so I don't think that fits this argument.

(and, I don't think you're giving us zero peanuts, that was just part of making the point)

I know it does simplify things quite a bit, but I can just see myself trying to check a weather widget and realizing that I left it on the 2nd home screen in landscape orientation.

I just don't know.

Side comment about possibly why people want portrait mode:
I think it's just because it feels more like paper. We grew up using paper in portrait orientation. I know, for one, when I want to read something and not interact a lot (like just reading the news/online articles), I would prefer to hold the device in portrait mode. Note that even most websites are designed like sheets of paper. Logic follows, that more of the content could be seen in a portrait orientation.

Even responding to a quick text message on the go, I would prefer a portrait mode keyboard, rather than a landscape one. Note that I *would* be using both hands in my portrait mode cases: one hand to hold the phone, the other to type, scroll, etc.

If I were to get deeply into a text messaging session with someone, or go to a website that requires a lot of user interaction (Facebook/social networking sites, for example), I would definitely pull out the hardware keyboard and proceed to use that.

I don't know, I think it's just something psychological. It's almost as if pulling out the hardware keyboard is a commitment to devoting time to whatever activity you're planning on doing.

Also, I'm sorry it makes things harder on you guys, and I can't exactly explain why, but portrait mode "feels" right for some things (for me at least).

I'll mention another of ysss' accursed word (android/g1) ... but this works just fine in Android. They cheat a little, which you can figure out from using it a little bit ... but it does have a grid of home screen objects. The grid is basically a 4x4 grid, and objects can take up 1 or more grid spaces (have to rectangular, but it could be a 4x1 grid, a 3x3 grid, etc ... application icons, by default, are 1x1 though).

You can rotate it, and the grid just rotates. And the image behind it. You do get different views of the background image when that happens (the closest way to describe it on a NIT would be: the background image is 800x800, and you see different sub-sections of that based on whether you're in portrait or landscape ... or, if you don't like that android-ish method you could simply re-scale/re-stretch the image on each rotation).

Part of their cheat is that: it's a 4x4 grid, in the middle of the screen. 4x4 rotates quite easily. The other cheat is that the bottom of the screen (in portrait)/right side of the screen (in landscape) is taken up by the application tray, which helps hide the fact that the grid is only 4x4, and not the whole screen.

In Maemo, you'd probably say that the grid is (in pixels) 480x480, centered on the screen. The area to either side of the grid could be for special things, or just for "see through to the background image" area. They could even be for certain universal buttons (answer call/dialer, browser, calendar, reject call/screen saver), and the other area could be for status symbols (an envelope if you have email, something else if you have SMS messages, something else if you have a missed call, something else if you have a voice-mail, etc.; click on the status icon to pull up that application).

Within the 480x480 area, you'd divide that up into however many grid spaces you want, as long as each space is square, and evenly divides the 480x480 area (so, for a 4x4 grid, each space would be 120x120). And then you can allow widgets to take up a 2x2, 3x2, 2x3, 3x3, 4x1, 1x4, or maybe even a 4x4 area (assuming you did a 4x4 grid).

And, note that those last two paragraphs are JUST for the home screen, not for the user interface in general.

I don't know about anyone else, but that'd be good enough for me, for the home screen. I could use it for quick status checks and to launch other applications, and not have to care what orientation it's in -- in any orientation, it will still work. No worries about how I'm holding it, no worries about reading the text or recognizing icons that are rotated away from horizontal, etc.

Want some peanuts?

Yes. Well. The N97 is a fine product and S60 5.0 is a fine piece of software, I don't want to say that. But ... um, lets say that perhaps there are even better solutions to this problem.

I'm all for enabling methods for the community to try out Home in portrait and trying to find clever solutions for the problems in hand.

I'm not all for shipping by default "to normal customers" with non-optimal solutions. In those cases, from my perspective, no feature at all is a better solution than a poorly thought out and implemented feature.

The hooks to detect portrait mode are there, as seen in Call app and in Conboy. But enabling it would basically require enabling portrait in the Dashboard view, because they are so integrally linked.

And that's a whole other can of worms: what would the Dashboard show in portrait mode, if the user came to Dashboard from landscape mode and then turns the device: do we ask each application to re-render itself into portrait. What do those applications do that cannot re-render themselves. Are there portrait and landscape thumbnails there at the same time. Or vice versa, if the user comes to Dashboard from portrait view. Do portrait applications still have a landscape app shaped thumbnail. Are the thumbnail contents rotated 90 degrees around. Do the users get surprised if the thumbnail icon they press in the Dashboard does not elegantly zoom into the full screen view (since the Dashboard would then have the thumbnail of the incorrect orientation [many apps look different in portrait and landscape] etc.).