What benefits does the stylus have over the finger? Non that I can think of, but I'm not a stylus kind of guy. The only thing I can thing of is that it allows more things on the screen at once because they can be smaller. I really think if people work on the GUI we can implement everything we need to be usable via touch instead of stylus.

If we are going to implement inertia scrolling I think scrolling itself on the N810 needs to be fixed first. I'm not sure if it is because the N810 isn't fast enough, or the code just needs to be improved, but when you scroll down through lists there is tons of horizontal tearing, and it looks very poor.

Mainly more things to choose from.

I had 6 bookmarks, I could see 3, and had to scroll. With a stylus I can see and find far more quickly.

Plus the fat finger things are ugly. Bloated. They offend my aesthetic sense.

I dislike ugly UIs, the 2008 UI had so many ugly things. They made the left side front page icons coloured and ugly, and the status bar icons monochrome and ugly. Adding bloated menus just topped it off.

Zebee

I suppose we'll never see eye to eye with this, but for me seeing 3 items on a finger enabled menu isn't a problem because scrolling is so easy, and I don't have to try to type with the N810's keyboard while holding the stylus in my fingers. I also don't even need to get the stylus out lol.

Speaking of which I read some people mentioning a soft thumb keyboard on the N800, does such a thing exist on the N810? I know it has a stylus board. There is a setting under Text input settings>On-screen which says "Launch finger keyboard with finger tap", but it sounded like the finger/stylus differential detection wasn't part of OS2008 from previous posts.

Edit: Well I don't know exactly what I did but somehow I apparently launched the finger keyboard... I can't relaunch it though lol.

I can't imagine trying to do a fine drawing in the sketch app with my finger. A stylus is good for fine precision pointing, things where a finger is too fat. Drawing is the main one I can think of, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are others.

I definitely agree there, its funny to see sketch apps on the iPod Touch because they have no real use lol. I've never been a fan of touchscreen drawings, are they really that important? Maybe I'm just bad at art, but I couldn't think of any real practical uses of a sketch app...

I've been in meetings wehre things are being sketched on the board, and, yeah, it's nice to be able to duplucate that sketch on my N810.

I'm fine with the stylus being ENTIRELY optional -- just something you use for detail work when you need detail, but I don't see a reason for eliminating the stylus from the device as a whole.

I use Xournal a lot for jotting notes. The stylus is necessary for even semi-legible writing. Other than that, I wouldn't use the stylus much at all of the apps were right. The one place, maybe, would be the stylus-board, nicer than the thumb-board for IMing and such. (You can see the other person's messages as they come in.) Of course, a good transparent floating thumb-board cures this, too...

The menu scrolls so nicely now, it's not so bad not fitting everything on one page. But I do miss the ability to nest menus. I had everything on OS2007 sorted so there was no scrolling at all. Now, the less-used stuff requires scrolling.


Benz:
You have to really thumb-thump to get the finger-board up; they removed the sensitivity setting for this, although I intend to hunt around in gconf, where a setting may still lurk...
They only removed the stylus-finger detection for menus, it's just crippled for the keyboard.

On my N800, I just lived with not seeing the other person's IM's as I typed.

On the N810, I just use the slide-out keyboard for that. Perfect :-)

I understand the stylus is probably in important input method for those using the N800 but the built in keyboard on the N810 really gets the job done nicely.

I have no trouble calling up the thumbboard (fingerboard?). There's a control panel For "Text Input Settings" and with "Launch finger keyoard with finger tap" checked, I either get the thumbboard right away or, if the stylusboard comes up, I get to the thumbboard by tapping with my finger again in the input area. At least that works in the browser and Notes utility.


(I feel presumptuous and stupid offering advice to someone who's been an IT user way longer than me, but maybe you missed something. Or maybe this is useful for someone else.)