June 13th, 2007
Poll: do you care that iPhone is missing a physical keyboard?
John Markoff of The New York Times seems to be somewhat troubled by the fact the Apple iPhone has no keyboard.
On the plus side, John admits that the absence of the keyboard frees up valuable real estate for the device’s 3.5- inch screen.
“A big screen makes the phone attractive for alternative uses like watching movies and that could open up new revenue streams for Apple and its partner, AT&T,” he writes.”
But then the lack of the screen could spark some usability issues. John feels that pecking on the onscreen representation of a keyboard with thumbs or fingers might be an unfamiliar experience. John even gets an expert to weigh in on that very aspect:
“The tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard is a pretty important aspect of human interaction,ā€¯ said Bill Moggeridge, a founder of Ideo, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, Calif. “If you take that away you tend to be very insecure.”
Because I think that tapping on an onscreen keyboard really won’t require that much adjustment, I am going to reserve any criticism of the iPhone’s lack of a “physical” keyboard. But what about you?
Loading ...Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
