Originally Posted by Karel Jansens

If you make a small computer-like device, you can go three ways:

1) Make it keyboard-centric, in which case you're basically going to produce a Psion (or a Pandora -- hehe); the clamshell design has (for the user, that is) several clear advantages, such as compactness, built-in screen protection and recognizeability. The user interface can be great (Psion's SIBO and EPOC are simply marvelous) or quite stupid (the Wince crowd), but simple text entering will always be quite straightforward. The reason I preferred Psion's offerings to Wincies, is that Psions have always been real, standalone computers, which allowed the user to do everything he could do on his Big Box.

2) You could decide to make a tablet, and then the user interface suddenly becomes very important: A tablet cannot be interacted with in the same way as a keyboarded computer, at least not without invoking serious frustration from the user. There have been two good tablet interfaces sofar: Palm and Newton. Palms however were always designed as computer companions, not primary devices; the Newton OTOH was designed from the ground up as a stylus-operated, handwriting-centric main computer.

3) The thrid choice is to make a content-serving device, or what is basically known as a PMP. There's gazillions of them around and they're quite good at serving up content, but pretty lousy at actually processing stuff.

It seems to me Nokia tried to market a PMP as a portable computer...

Originally Posted by iamNarada

I'd like to see Nokia implement a "profile" manager, with a "lightweight" profile comprising a finger driven UI(and perhaps the majority of the functions accessible in this profile would be PMP functions), a "welterweight" profile comprising a stylus driven UI (menus galore, options by the thousands), and a "heavyweight" profile which assumes that you have a keyboard (bluetooth) and intend to use the IT as a laptop replacement.

Originally Posted by iamNarada

When you say handwritten interface, are you referring primarily to handwriting recognition for text entry? (I'm assuming you are ....correct me) and saying that this is advantageous because of increased input speed, ease of use....? I didn't get to use the Newton (before my time), and I haven't used the handwriting capabilities of my NIT, so I'm honestly at a lost as to the killer app that comes with the stylus and/or a handwriting interface.

Originally Posted by Texrat

I think you're overreacting to Roope's comments. What he said does not preclude stylus HWR... just that he believes the main focus should be on finger friendliness.

I'm an employee too... and many times what I say about direction is my own opinion.

Originally Posted by benny1967

Maybe it's my complete lack of imagination, but when I look at the clumsy, big UI-elements of finger driven devices (and this includes those absurdly big menus and scrollbars in OS2008), I don't see how they could efficiently handle menus and dialogues with lots of options.
Somthing like XChat, for example, with its sub-menus and 100 options... it's hard for me to imagine how a finger-driven UI could handle all this without breaking it down into even more sub-menus and sub-sub-windows/tabs, thus making it totally unusable.
(But, as I said, maybe it's just my lack of imagination. Surprise me with something that works. I still wouldn't use it because I hate finger taps on my screen, but it'd be interesting to see.)

Originally Posted by ragnar

Practically I see also very little interest in handwriting solutions, even those that Karel is praising. If HWR really would be the killer input method, those solutions would be very much more popular than what they are. The situation is of course different with certain scripts, like Japanese and Chinese, but for Western input the virtual keyboards are simply faster to use and require much less effort, both physically and mentally from the users than what handwriting does.

Originally Posted by ragnar

I don't see this changing. If Apple owns the Best Ever handwriting input method and engine, then I don't really see much light coming even from their direction in this issue.

Originally Posted by ragnar

Hi. For the specific issue of handwriting, I do stand by my original comment. Any sensible form of handwriting requires stylus usage, and therefore a stylus usable UI. It would make very little sense to go towards finger usability while insisting on a stylus usable input method.

As a purely personal opinion, the stylus must be killed, the sooner the better. It's good for specific limited operations, but it's about the single geekiest part of using a PDA or a tablet. Mass market acceptance will never come with a device requiring extensive use of the stylus. The slideout keyboard in the N810 is the first stab in the physical domain, but for the health of the platform the onscreen methods need also to be kept healthy.

Practically I see also very little interest in handwriting solutions, even those that Karel is praising. If HWR really would be the killer input method, those solutions would be very much more popular than what they are. The situation is of course different with certain scripts, like Japanese and Chinese, but for Western input the virtual keyboards are simply faster to use and require much less effort, both physically and mentally from the users than what handwriting does. I don't see this changing. If Apple owns the Best Ever handwriting input method and engine, then I don't really see much light coming even from their direction in this issue.

Then again, I'm only an interaction designer. If some manager higher up wishes otherwise, then what I say has rather little significance.

Originally Posted by ragnar

I'd say the right solution would be not to have 100 different options for a small application. Once again imho it has vastly too much settings, I'm a rather advanced user and still even I have difficulties in actually doing anything sensible with those settings.