• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Touchscreens are Overrated

I don't mind that some people prefer Blackberries or a physical keyboard. I like my full touchscreen just fine.
 
I always thought I would hate virtual keyboards, but a year with an iPod Touch and a few days with an Incredible have changed me to the dark side.

Besides, I'm loving Swype on my Incredible right now. Can't do that with a physical keyboard.
 
excellent article. I'v benn a cell phone owner since 1994 when i got my first nokia triband in Tokyo while stationed over there. i have not had a landlines in over 12 years now. phones have come so far since then and they get better and better every day it seems. i am lightning fast ona phyical keyboard but just type like a 5 year old on the touch keyboard. with the touchscreens i feel like a cave man finger pecking at 3 wpm. i with i were better at it because the touch only phones are very smooth and quite nice on the pockets. i see hope on the horizon though, the tiem i have spent test driving the incredible has been enjoyable and i can almost type normally on it when held sideways.

i'm excited about this summer and the rumors of the droid2 and shadow coming to verizon. i really like the droid and the incredible, even though the drod's keyboard is not as nice as my old i760 which had a dedicated row for numbers. so if the new phones expected to drop this summer as much better than hoped for, i will finally have another phone that lasts me a few years.
 
sontaikle said:
I always thought I would hate virtual keyboards, but a year with an iPod Touch and a few days with an Incredible have changed me to the dark side.

Besides, I'm loving Swype on my Incredible right now. Can't do that with a physical keyboard.
Click to expand...

I have swype and a physical qwerty...
 
Me personally, now being a backflip owner (previously a owner of a blackberry bold which had a fabolus qwerty keyboard), I can honestly say now at this point the backflip is definately the best phone I have ever owned. My friend has a droid that I use quite often, yet I prefer the backflip. I know the droid obv. Has better specs, but its the dynamics of the keyboard and the interface on the backflip is more of my liking.
 
I'm happy with a touchscreen keyboard, and using Swype makes it better. I've never found the small physical keyboards found on most phones to be of any use, and to me they're certainly not worth losing the screen space.
 
actually, the best physical keyboards are full keyboards which are to big to share the same space with the screen, I.E. flip/slider phones. the best i ever had was my last phone, samsung i760 slider. almost full screen it shared with a number pad plus a nice physical keyboard when you slid the screen sideways. and it awesomely had slot on the side for the micro sd that i used in my camera as well as for all my files that i used in the field and office. that micro sd fit into a thumb drive so i could use it on the desktop, in my cam and on my phone. being able to do reports in the field on my phone saved me 2 to 3 hours a day doing end of shift reports. bricking that phone made me so sad since i could not get another and had to settle for half the phone.
 
Both the G1 and DROID, among others, have sliding physical keyboards.

IMO, BlackBerries are OK for typing e-mails, but the OS is crap for doing anything above that. Have you ever tried browsing on a BlackBerry? Not a pleasant experience.
 
Any pda-like work on my Galaxy is a slow, slow affair. This is exactly because of the crummy touch screen keyboard.

I've had a Psion Revo with a big screen and equally big physical keyboard (landscape clamshell style). My brother even touch-typed on his Psion Series 5. There's no way a touch screen can match that, because of the lack of tactile feedback about the edges of individual key caps.

My last pda was a Palm Tungsten T3, which supported not only handwriting recognition, but transparent and full-screen (so it didn't use any UI real estate) and customizable (so I could make my own strokes for "
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom