Survey about the Touchscreen

Anton Persson don.juanton at gmail.com
Sat Nov 22 14:03:13 CET 2008


>
>
> > The current OpenMoko compromise is not suitable for running a spreadsheet
> > application or a word processor.
>
> For you maybe, but Abiword and Gnumeric are working fine for me.
>

True, that's my own opinion. I think the display is too small and the input
method
is too hard. But I must confess; I generally don't use anything other than
Emacs
and Eclipse for anything close to word processing and one of the things with
emacs is that you really need a keyboard with it.. :-P


>
> > If you want those applications then you
> > need to have some sort of keyboard. When the Ilume keyboard is active
> > you only have perhaps 60% left of the screen. That means your application
> > only have _half_ a VGA display. This practically eliminates the pro that
> > people here have been bringing up, the full VGA display.
>
> The Psion's only half-VGA and it works fine there. The Psion does make
> better
> use of the screen space, but that's an application issue.
>

Which means that you would still be happy if you had a slightly bigger
display
and a slightly thicker stylus, right? Maybe even happier if you could use
both
your thumbs to push buttons on the on-screen keyboard. (For shift/alt keys
etc. But of course, that could be solved by adding a couple of more real
buttons..)


> >
> > If you think I'm wrong, could you please tell me in which situations you
> > really
> > could use application X or Y on your OpenMoko? And I mean in a situation
> > where you would not have easy access to your EeePC in your back-pack.
>
> Exactly the same situations where I use them on the Psion, probably more
> because I would carry it in situations where even the Psion is too big.
> When
> I first got the Psion I found myself using it in many more situations than
> I

had expected, simply because it was there and it worked.


OK, that's a convincing example to me.  But I'm not convinced that a
capacitive
screen+stylus would prevent you from doing the same things. The iPhone has
a bigger display but is in total smaller than the OpenMoko, and correct me
(again) if I'm wrong, but aren't there some sort of word-processor for the
iPhone too?


>
> > On the other hand, if you add a multi touch capable LCD panel, then you
> > would
> > enable software developers like myself to develop a whole range of new
> > applications that are _not_ possible on a desktop or on the current
> > OpenMoko...
> > Applications that you will never see on the current OpenMoko.
> >
> > (I'm still not ruling out the possibility of a multi touch enabled
> > resistive screen,
> > but I never heard of such a thing...)
>
> I've never seen a commercial one, but I don't think it presents too many
> technical hurdles. unfortunately Openmoko aren't big enough to push a
> manufacturer to make such a thing, unlike Apple.
>

True, which means we will probably never see a resistive multi touch enabled
screen on an OpenMoko...

    Best regards
      Anton
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