If there’s a potential disaster awaiting Apple’s iPhone, it’s that the smart cellphone lacks a mechanical keyboard.
It forces users to use a touch-screen keyboard, something that may throw of millions of young people accustomed to texting quickly on basic phones and, for that matter, also older professionals used to typing slowly on a full keyboard offered by a Palm or Blackberry.
There’s a story about this “billion-dollar gamble” in the NYT today.
Also, check out the experience of the Taiwanese company HTC, which recently released a new model, the HTC Touch. Its “TouchFLO” technology, which enables the owners to swipe up, down, and diagonally across the screen to navigate, has been billed by some as a direct challenge to the iPhone’s new approach (however, we caution here because this piece is written by the same author who wrote yesterday’s Times story about Facebook, which was inaccurate). Indeed, there are less hyped reports that reveal the HTC just isn’t working.
6 Comments
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Preston said:
I honestly can’t imagine this keyboard working as well as most consumers are accustomed.
That being said, I applaud apple for taking such a large risk on a technology that if received well will forever change the way most of us interface with our PDA’s/phones….
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Brad Bowers said:
This is the exact problem I alos identified with the iPhone. As a business user who regularly uses my phone (Cingular 8525) for email, the on-screen keyboard simply won’t fly.
For consumers, and the youth audience, I agree that this could also be an issue. However, the younger set seems a bit more flexible to try and adopt new things.
Overall the device looks great, but the lack of keyboard makes it difficult to see how this would work well for any business user who uses their phone heavily for email.
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Yuri Ammosov said:
Another and a much better substantiated report here states that TouchFlo works alright.
http://www.mobile-review.com/pda/review/htc-elf-en.shtmland here’s a video showing how TouchFlo actually works (attn: 22 Mb avi)
http://www.mobile-review.com/pda/review/image/htc/touch/video-review/scroll-in-programm.avi -
Mark Wendman said:
I am guessing that a quick fix to typability / speed of same is to use a removable transparent gelpack adhered plastic film to serve as a mechanical mask to permit faster typing in the touchscreen - by limiting stray key signals from overlap.
That might be the ticket for a simple fix for usability.
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Aymerik said:
Must be a slow tech news day at the NYTimes. It’s articles like that that make me want to take up blogging.
Seriously, 6 months after its announcement they realize that “That iPhone Has a Keyboard, but It’s Not Mechanical?”
Not entirely clear why Helio was considered relevant for a quote, either. “There has never been a massively successful consumer device based solely on a touch screen.” That’s totally missing the point. Good products integrate technologies to create something that’s better than the sum of parts, let alone just one part. The iPhone isn’t based solely on a touch screen. The experience is about a lot more than that. Even RIM’s regular BlackBerry line is about a lot more than having a full keyboard.
And incidentally, there has never been a massively successful MVNO, either, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the backers of Helio from trying.
Markoff taking a quote from Dayton on texting is bizarre as well, considering that other than Helio users (which are few and far between relative to the general cellular user base), the vast majority of folks doing SMS are typing on regular mobile phone handset with 12 typically tiny keys, not full keyboards. Nokia and others do quite well selling phones which aren’t centered around texting.
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Gregg said:
Spb’s Full Screen KB works great on my HTC Touch
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