GTA03 - buttons or touchscreen

David Pottage david at electric-spoon.com
Sun Oct 26 11:15:53 CET 2008


On Saturday 25 October 2008 17:39:18 JW wrote:
> vote and tell OM what you want for the next phone
>
> 1) touchscreen (no qwerty buttons) - freerunner, HTC Orbit, iphone
> 2) qwerty keyboard and tracker ball - blackberry curve
> 3) combination touchscreen plus qwerty - G1

As others have said, lets not complicate the situation for software authors by 
radically changing the input methods. For this reason, I think the touch 
screen has to stay. Having said that I think input would be a lot easier if 
we had a few extra hardware buttons.

In order of preference

Option 1: Touchscreen. 
It would be nice though if we had a few extra buttons though. I suggest a 
joystick or mini trackball below the screen and a couple of soft keys on 
either side.

Option 3: Touchscreen + Mini qwerty.
The problem with this idea is that a small query is very hard to type on, and 
a big one will take a lot of screen real estate. The way I see it the only 
way a query keyboard can be incorporated into a future Openmoko device 
without compromising the screen is to make it slide out from the back like 
the Nokia N810. The problem with that is it will increase the bulk and cost 
by to much. Perhaps a better solution would be to have a small numeric keypad 
that won't take much room.

Option 2: Mini Qwerty, no Touchscreen
I HATE this idea, because it will make all existing Openmoko software 
incompatible. Please don't take this route.

-- 
David Pottage




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