“If there is a billion-dollar gamble underlying Apple’s iPhone, it lies in what this smart cellphone does not have: a mechanical keyboard. As the clearest expression yet of the Apple chief executive’s spartan design aesthetic, the iPhone sports only one mechanical button, to return a user to the home screen. It echoes Steven P. Jobs’s decree two decades ago that a computer mouse should have a single button. (Most computer mice these days have two.) His argument was that one button ensured that it would be impossible to push the wrong button.”
Link: That iPhone Is Missing a Keyboard (nytimes.com)
Comments 4
It should be possible for the iPhone to give some feedback through the vabrate motor.
http://yandleblog.com/2007/03/will-iphone-feature-haptic-feedback.html
Posted 21 Jun 2007 at 2:04 am ¶You’re absolutely right. Unless Jobs has something up his sleeve, I think that the lack of keyboard feedback will be the real limitation on the iPhone’s success.
http://smithkl42.blogspot.com/2007/06/real-problem-with-iphone-no-haptics.html
Posted 25 Jun 2007 at 4:23 pm ¶Since most people won’t write novels on the iPhone, I think the visual feedback on the screen is completely sufficient…
Posted 27 Jun 2007 at 12:21 am ¶So here’s my issue with touchscreen handsets (and this also extends partly to QWERTY): it’s really hard to walk down the street and write an SMS using just one hand. You’ve got to look at the screen to target which is something I don’t need to do writing T9 predictive text; I can effectively touch type in T9. It can also be much harder to target generally without raised buttons. Touchscreen phones are a step backwards for me in this regard.
(I’ll admit I’m not an American, and Americans typically don’t use predictive text like people in most other countries).
Posted 27 Jun 2007 at 5:37 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
The Real Problem with the iPhone: No Haptics…
Im holding off on the iPhone. Sure, its spendy, but not having seen the real thing yet I suspect the real problem will be the keyboard. On my Cingular 8525, about the only thing I use the touch screen for is dialing numbers not already in m…
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