Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

I guess I should explain the poll about hands the other day. I was asked to participate in some usability testing for an experimental phone keypad. Using the keypad was difficult, I found the keys too close together so I kept double keying and pressing the wrong buttons (I think I even quad-keyed at one point). The conclusion of the discussion afterward was that my hands are too big – I was claiming they were average sized hands for an English male since I was sure that somebody would have pointed out that I hand particularly large hands if it were so.

What are your thoughts on mobile phone keypads? Are they getting to be too small and difficult to use? Or are they just fine and I need to stop whinging and press more carefully?


Categories: Memories.

/ 11 Comments

11 comments

  1. hirez

    I’ve been muttering under my breath about the keypad on the 7250 since I bought the blasted thing. ‘Too small, etc, etc’. So I stood it, the 8110 and the 3110 side by side, and… They’re exactly the same size vertically. Horizontally, the keys on the 7250 are about half the size, but I don’t think that’s a problem because the overall width of the keypad is largely the same. I think the ‘problem’ is that the keys, and indeed the entire casework on the 7250 is of some shiny plastic that’s slippery as all hell unless you’ve perfectly dry hands. The other phones have matte finishes and rubber keypads which are just… Better.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Yeah, I found the little joystick on the 7650 great to use until I’d had some chips, absolutely impossible to work with greasy fingers.

      Reply
  2. mr_flay

    “Your fingers are too fat to dial. If you require assistance, please mash the keypad repeatedly.”

    I think part of the trouble is that they are making phones dinkier and dinkier, so keys are getting absurdly tiny. Also, they are not elevating the keys from the casing as much as they used to, which makes life harder. My biggest problem is that Nokia now seem to be trying to break the mould of phone appearance, with pseudo rotary-dial fascia and quirky-shaped keypad arrangements, which means that the buttons cluster awkwardly in some places and make it harder to press the right buttons until you’re thoroughly conversant with the things.

    Of course, you being a ham-fisted loon won’t have helped ;)

    Reply
    • neilh

      Oh, you mean I’m not supposed to punch the keypad until it does random things? I can’t deal with this technology, too damned complicated, what was wrong with two tin cans and a piece of string?

      Agreed about rotary keypad, I spent more time searching for the keys than actually pressing them, but I did only try to use one for a couple of days before giving it back to my boss.

      What phone do you have these days?

      Reply
  3. moosipher

    Ive got a Nokia 3300 – which I bought for the mp3 malarky . Dialing a number is a little fiddly – bacause I do have long fingers , not fat ones . BUT attempting to send a text message is nigh on impossible , as the keypad has 6 physical keys that produce 36 characters . I have to agree – I think we need to return to the trusty brick , oh so popular circa 1986 … But with PDA’s and other mobile computer type thingies that also have the secondary function of a phone , do you not think that the basic mobile phone will be obsolete in any case within years ?

    Reply
    • hirez

      Sounds like the 7250 keypad. After several days of swearing, I started to feel my way around the keys, which made life much nicer. I note that the 8110 has lumps either side (top and bottom) of the ‘5’ key, so you can dial in the dark.

      I think trying to squeeze a qwerty keypad into something with the form-factor of a phone (The Treo, for instance) is a mistake. We shall see where Bluetooth and PANs lead us. Component phone-tech, with any luck.

      It has long been alleged (in the voice of Tom Baker, usually) that I have woman’s hands, mind.

      Reply
      • neilh

        Isn’t there some distinguishing thing about the centre key on the 7250?

        The old S5 keyboard was probably about as small as a practical qwerty board can get, my chunky old 7650 is about 2/3s the size of the 5. The days of proper keyboards on these things are definitely in the past – that said, a fold-out bluetooth keyboard a-la palm keyboard would make things considerably easier, you could buy one if you needed that, keep it folded away when you were just reading….there were always two camps in the old days, the S5/Revo was a data entry platform, good for taking notes and collecting information, the palm was a data retrieval platform, you’d load it up with your newsfeeds in the morning and read them on the train. They never really crossed into each others markets.

        Reply
        • hirez

          [FX: Peers at phone in the manner of a headmaster]

          Ah, yes. Nodules either side of the ‘5’ key.

          I’ve never seen the point of data-entry on some handheld. (And I’ve variously owned/blagged all sorts of toys – One of those Casio things that looked like a calculator with qwerty buttons helped me through exams @ college in 1984, and later I struggled with a Z88, for example) The Palm is/was ideal for scribbling the sort of notes I’d generally bung on the back of an envelope – kit serial numbers when doing a machine-room audit. That sort of thing… But if I’m going to have Writing and Thinking, then it’s pseudocode scribbled on an A4 pad, ta.

          I think the component-phone concept is the best idea, but that would require the manufacturers to stop thinking like telcos and start thinking like… PC or hifi makers.

          Reply
          • neilh

            The S5 came into its own at a conference I went to – even in those days it was old-tech but I kinda liked it so took it along anyway. The laptop I’d borrowed had a battery life of around 1.5 hours, meaning you had to roam around finding power every so often during the day. The Series 5 would run for two or three days on a set of AA batteries. There was no way you could take conference notes with that kind of intensity on a palm, but the 5s keyboard was perfect for it. Sure, most of the time you don’t need to do that kind of data entry on the road, but the times you do it was a really worthwhile device. These days you’d be hard pushed to find anything that’ll do that job well, laptop battery life isn’t getting any better, phones are too small and fiddly and PDAs just don’t have good enough keyboards any more. Doubtless there’ll be something that fixes this problem, maybe the modular thing will help, but right now we’re in an in-between time.

            Sadly my 5 died of running out of battery (mine was a 24Mb mx which kept the ‘rom’ in ram) and not having access to a rom image to ‘flash’ it with. The revos battery has gone the way of all revo batteries. So I’m currently trying to do the job with the 7650 and/or the N2701 but neither are any good for touch typing. Maybe I’ll succumb to the cute subnotebooks they have here, something less chunky than this laptop.

    • neilh

      Well, its got to be said that I rarely use either of my (mobile) phones for actual calls, so the data entry and retrieval is way more important to me than the call interface. My foma phone is almost impossible to use as either a phone or a data access/recording unit – sure, it does everything, it just doesn’t do anything well enough to actually want to use it for doing anything.

      Obviously interface needs to change, we’re cramming more and more into these small boxes, the limiting factor these days is not size of technology, but size of people. Some of us ‘hamfisted Europeans’ will be cursed with having to dig around in the recycle bins for old-tech phones that fit our fingers, while those with dainty fingers get the latest cool tech. No fair, I say.

      Reply
  4. neilh

    Re: I’ll wager that bluetooth peripheral never had to chew through the side of a ship…

    Argh, disturbing visions of people typing away on the keyboard in their trouser pocket while waiting for the tube.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.