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Disappointed with the onscreen buttons

schimm said:
Not that it matters but the rezound's capacitive buttons are dark red and when not backlit look quite fetching against its sleek dark surface. Sometimes I find myself staring at it. Then I think she is so smart she sees me staring. And then I feel embarrassed. You know beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And when my girl is turned off she looks prettier than yours.
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To each is own haha. The red buttons on the Rezound were one of the worst design choices I've seen on a phone IMO.
 
The very best buttons were that on the X series. Small, hard buttons.They were ergonomically sound, and they stayed out of your way. No need for them to be large. Moto had it right. Sometimes the latest isn't the greatest. And it isn't here with this phone. IMO. I would guess the rom designers are at work to give rooters the flexibility to rid themselves of these huge things given all the threads and posts I've seen on the issue.
 
no buttons is the future... I love it...

with that said, they can be difficult sometimes... as you have to look at the screen to know where your pressing, whereas - with a physical button you get more feedback... which you wouldn't get with capacitive buttons either... so capacitive vs on-screen is a no brainier for me. if you want permanent buttons, they should be physical touch-n-click.
 
My biggest issue with this is that at the moment, there's no point having software buttons. That screen real estate is just sucking my battery juice. If I had the choice, I'd take hardware buttons and a slightly smaller screen, purely for battery reasons.

But, if they were to make it somehow configurable, or at least do something with that extra screen real estate (that doesn't involve playing videos), then I am more than happy to keep them. But yeah, at the moment, it doesn't make sense to me.

And just to clarify, by "hardware buttons" I just mean, some sort of buttons that aren't the screen, eg. the buttons on most new HTC's.
 
schimm said:
The very best buttons were that on the X series. Small, hard buttons.They were ergonomically sound, and they stayed out of your way. No need for them to be large. Moto had it right. Sometimes the latest isn't the greatest. And it isn't here with this phone. IMO. I would guess the rom designers are at work to give rooters the flexibility to rid themselves of these huge things given all the threads and posts I've seen on the issue.
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i will agree with the fact that the X phones buttons were nice.
 
Personally, I prefer the software buttons and I'm glad Google got rid of the fixed buttons. I think in the long-run it's more intuitive, by far, to include buttons based on context. It also allows for greater flexibility, not just from the OEMs, but also for the hacking/dev community. For example, I didn't use the old search button much, but many people do/did. The easy solution is to simply add it (as an option or otherwise), for those that want it-- in the process, we once again emphasize choice, as a highlight of Android.

As to appearance, I think the GN is one of the most handsome devices out, right now. I love the totally black monolithic face, when the display is off, and I like how the buttons blend into the bezel when on. To each their own, though.

Also, I'm not sure how it was established that software buttons replacing the fixed buttons, resulted in worse battery life. I understand the connection, but I'm not sure how much each taxes the battery; and if its substantial or negligible, when compared.

Either way, I'll stick with the software buttons.:cool:
 
I love the software buttons. And for the supposed wasted space on the bottom of the screen, it's very nice to have it there to rest your thumb on when holding the phone in landscape more. I can imagine it being rather annoying to accidentally hit the screen while viewing a video or browsing.
 
AussieAndroid said:
My biggest issue with this is that at the moment, there's no point having software buttons. That screen real estate is just sucking my battery juice.
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That's negligible. The area is small so it doesn't make a difference. Plus, the display doesn't use any power when the pixels are black so only the actual buttons are using battery which is not that much at all.
 
Mooem said:
I love the software buttons. And for the supposed wasted space on the bottom of the screen, it's very nice to have it there to rest your thumb on when holding the phone in landscape more. I can imagine it being rather annoying to accidentally hit the screen while viewing a video or browsing.
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It's very annoying when you accidentally touch the capacitative buttons while watching a movie and have it closed on you :@
 
trophynuts said:
i will agree with the fact that the X phones buttons were nice.
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Having come from the Droid X, I did like the X buttons. They were nice, until I got a small scratch one one, which leaked light. also the buttons leaked light around them. Also there was that nice bug where the lights would be BLAZING at full intensity sometimes, like when watching a video.

I don't miss those drawbacks, the only thing I DO miss is that sometimes when typing I hit the home button instead of the space button, but I had the same problem with capacitive buttons. It's stopped happening as much since I've grown more used to typing on it, so that's really not an issue.

All in all, I have to say I really like the software buttons, but they're not without drawbacks. I do look forward to future iterations of how they are implemented, as they can be made to do ANYTHING in the future, and I think we'll see more interesting things out of them in the future.

On a side note, I don't miss not having search or menu buttons at all, since they're now on all the programs I need them on. I thought I would really miss them, but it hasn't been an issue for me at all.
 
I can see both sides of the argument though I lean towards on-screen buttons. One thing I don't miss from my DX is the blinding button lights "feature" particularly when they would illuminate randomly. That was a real drag.

Self-hiding on-screen buttons are coming out more often as developers enable them. Mobo Player got them recently. I imagine as more developers get on-board, they'll be hiding the majority of the time.
 
One thing I'm surprised you guys haven't mentioned is that with AMOLED displays, when there is a black area of the screen, the display is essentially turned off for that section. So with the menu button bar being 95% black, it really isn't sucking up as much power as you think it is.

It's white you want to watch out for. That's why people like to invert the page rendering, it saves a lot of battery.

This is why the blacks are so satisfyingly black on AMOLED displays. It's intrinsic to their design.
 
ExDementia said:
One thing I'm surprised you guys haven't mentioned is that with AMOLED displays, when there is a black area of the screen, the display is essentially turned off for that section. So with the menu button bar being 95% black, it really isn't sucking up as much power as you think it is.

It's white you want to watch out for. That's why people like to invert the page rendering, it saves a lot of battery.

This is why the blacks are so satisfyingly black on AMOLED displays. It's intrinsic to their design.
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I did mention it... -____-
Look 4 posts above you
 
There are definitely some growing pains with a big UI change like this -- ultimately I think it will be better. And I am glad they are trying to think through the idea of how people interact with elements on the screen. (such as swiping away notifications).

As was said, the ability to rotate is a major advantage of course. And hopefully more customizing will come.

That said, it's not without problems.

I posted this elsewhere but figure it might be relevant here: (I had just gotten home from an ICS dev training meetup @ Google)

This is responding to questions about why Google went with the ActionBar and removed Search and Menu (obviously I dont speak for Google this is just my guess on why they did what they did)

(This was a) usability mistake by Matias Duarte ....(Though I think he's been a positive influence from a UX standpoint overall)

That said, it's been coming since Honeycomb.

The thinking was they had discoverability issues (or so they thought).

The question was actually asked ..... if anyone had these issues, only about 4 or the 140 devs there raised their hands.

And,....it's still hidden in a menu -- not much of a usability gain to move the menu to a smaller button and possibly to the top OR bottom instead of a dedicated key.

Additionally, I personally feel that while task switching is nice, there is no reason to have it replace the menu. It's less important than menu and search (IMO).

However, they did add the ability to show important actions outside the menu. So there is a silver lining here. For example, if you look at the screenshots, the search icon is outside of the menu, even though that's technically a MenuItem from a dev standpoint.

Still, I think the rationale was flawed in that it was incomplete. Some of the reasoning was correct, but I feel like they didn't consider the whole picture.

I think they re/moved search because it confused users in that it was sometime global, and other times contextual. I think they could have fixed this by giving users an option.

>if search pressed in app -> show "search this app or search global?" popup dialog....(maybe with "remember this choice for this app/all apps").

I also think that the real rationale for deprecating the menu button was because it's not a button you see on other platforms like iPhone, etc. This meant a fair number of iPhone -> Android app ports just ignored the menu completely.

So, to me this seems silly. I'm of course obsessively opinionated regarding my UI/UX with computing devices, but I think they couldn't have known the percentage that found search and menu keys helpful vs the percentage that had trouble with discovering features hidden in menus. And, considering they essentially just moved the menu around a bit, in some cases further away from the user's finger (it can be hard to tap now) I think they created more problems than they solved.

Another problem they seem to have created, not sure if they mentioned this in that post, (but I just noticed last night) is the long-press on menu used to bring up the keyboard for shortcuts. This was especially helpful for fast scrolling through alphabetical lists. I was just getting used to this and just thinking how helpful it could be. (Though admittedly I may be missing where they moved the feature).

Finally though, another silver lining, and back to the idea of having important features/actions right in front of the user. The "ActionBar" as a paradigm is actually quite a good one. Many devs (myself included) have created headers and footers to our apps to hold important buttons/information.

So it's a bit of a mixed bag. I think mostly the thing I hate about it is the execution. They forced these menus off into hard to use places, but rather they should have provided better "ActionBar-paradigm" solutions and let the devs gradually migrate. There is no reason they could not have kept the menu key there with equal weight but hidden if not used.

Devs do migrate towards best practices over time, but only when Google does a good job explaining how to get there. This is the problem they had with tablet apps. The API was so terrible, and they did such a poor job explaining it, they had to hold worldwide training sessions to teach devs how to use it.


TL;DR version

- Mostly a bad usability mistake
- Menu discoverability is still a problem
- Menus can now exists in two places
- Search is more obviously contextual
- Menu long-press = keyboard seems gone
- The execution of making things hard for devs (and users) was bad bad bad :mad:
- The idea of ActionBars is good conceptually
- The execution shows they did not take the bigger picture into account
- Hindsight is 20/20 (depending on how nice looking someone's hind is :cool:)
- Overall we're just at a stepping stone on the way to awesomeness :)

/end my $0.99
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The cool part about having an Action Bar is that you can change it in response to market research. You can't change permanent buttons.

It makes sense for the task switcher to be at the most fundamental level. It makes sense for the home key to always be there. It makes sense for the menu key to only appear if a menu is available. So a lot they got right.
 
I keep pressing the home button while writing texts and it's infuriating me lol. Also when I cant see the screen in direct brightness properly, and want to go back to home screen etc, I keep pressing the very bottom of the phone expecting it to work lol. I guess my brain wants the huge gap at the bottom of the phone to have the buttons on lol :D
Can't complain though, love the phone
 
Wasn't it rumored last year that the iPhone 5 (4s) was looking to remove the iPhone's Home button with a capacitive button? I figured this was Google way of jumping ahead of Apple, or out-innovating them.
 
Matreyu said:
Wasn't it rumored last year that the iPhone 5 (4s) was looking to remove the iPhone's Home button with a capacitive button? I figured this was Google way of jumping ahead of Apple, or out-innovating them.
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I hope it's buttonS and not just button but it would take up a lot of real estate if they keep the screen at 3.5"
 
The on-screen buttons eat screen estate, period. That space is the reason why the display would be bigger. If it is eaten by the on-screen buttons, the screen gets smaller. So what's the point?

This is my only gripe with the Gnex. My phone is Xperia Arc with hardware buttons outside the screen, and I am maximizing the use of my 4.2" screen. With those on-screen buttons on Gnex, they practically have the same screen, so I don't see any point in upgrading to this phone.

Better the Galaxy S3 which buttons don't use the screen.
 
I rooted my phone which was easy and I use LMT launcher and a full screen mod so I don't have any on screen buttons. I love the extra real estate. Plus I can get rid of the notification bar as well if I want so I can get even more screen space.
 
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