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 _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community