Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Someone has just submitted a software defect against our project saying that the letters on the keytops are in upper case and that its quicker to text if they are in lower case.

Does anyone else have trouble with this?


Categories: Memories.

/ 22 Comments

22 comments

  1. dan_lane

    you mean the actual text printed on the keys?… oh yeah, I spent hours looking for the lower case ones when I first LOST MY FUCKING MIND!!!

    … and don’t you start calling it “texting” now… it’s “send a text message” or “send an SMS” … TEXT IS NOT A VERB.

    eugh, I hate mornings.

    Reply
    • strange_complex

      TEXT IS NOT A VERB

      Hey, English is a rich and fast-evolving language… ‘1471’ is a verb these days, and ’69’ has been for years. If numbers can be verbs, nouns definitely can! ;-)

      Reply
          • venta

            ‘txtng’

            Yeuch, yeuch, yeuch.

            I think I have IVS.

            (And I just had to get my phone out the pocket to even work out what case the letters on the keys were. Upper case appears to be the answer. I do compose sms’s slowly, but that’s because the shoddy Motorola predictive text can’t keep up with me :( )

    • neilh

      Yeah, the printing on the keys themselves.

      ‘Text’ can be whatever I want it to be if you understand what I mean by it…thats the beauty of language we’re all helping it to evolve by forming concensus on its interpretation. Grammar nazis bedamned.

      Reply
    • neilh

      Maybe you could write messages quicker if you looked at the keycaps?

      (I’d not really thought about it until I saw this report)

      Reply
    • neilh

      Hehehe, having a slow afternoon in Cambridge? Seriously, if you’ve got anything you think should be fixed let ChrisT know, he’ll pass it on I’m sure.

      Reply
    • neilh

      It was submitted as a defect, we have to treat it seriously (even if I don’t think it was intended seriously), investigate, reproduce, fix reject or postpone, or ask for more information.

      My initial response: our target market sends more text messages in upper case than lower case, this is not a software defect, its just not targetted at you.

      Reply
  5. neilh

    Indeed, all the other Nokias I can lay my hands on have their keycaps in little letters but the NEC and Fujitsu FOMAs I have here are both in upper case.

    Not sure targetting chinese market makes much difference to mechanics design, it has much effect on software but only minor on keytop printing.

    Besides, our phone has changable covers anyway, so maybe there’ll be a black market for illicit lower case keytops.

    Reply
  6. neilh

    Re: feeling left out!

    More information required, we cannot do anything with this defect without a URL and some idea what the user thought he was trying to do. Recommend ignore.

    Reply
  9. Anonymous

    Sigh…

    Look, if I tell you to link to the page containing the picture and not the picture itself, then I mean it.

    Bandwidth theft is a bad idea, don’t do it.

    Well, at least you didn’t do it inline…

    Reply
  10. incy

    i remeber having a lecture (or part of one) on upper versus lower case (though not in the context of mobile phone emssaging). Basically it is easier to read if type d in mainly lower case (with Caps where appropiate) rather then in all upper case, the different heights of the letters making it much easier and quicker to read (something about pattern matching and it made them more distinct then upper case, which all had the same height and sat on the same spot on the line). If you are interested I suspect I can find my notes somewhere. However for short messages it mattered less and in cerating cases (such as warning messages) theyw oudl help stand out becuase of the different type face.

    But in contexts of laying out of keybads, AFAIK everyone i have ever seen has had upper case letters (though phone pads tend to have lower now I think about it).

    Reply
    • neilh

      It seems Nokia keypads generally have lower case while everyone elses have upper case (its not easy to find non-Nokian phones in a Nokia office, so its not an exhaustive survey by any stretch). Ours has upper case.

      Reply
  11. neilh

    Re: Sigh…

    I know the concept of bandwidth theft – in this case this was *nearly* a private discussion (admittedly in a public forum) in which there were two or three participants. The discussion is disposable, with no concept of profit being made from other peoples work, a fair use argument at least.

    If they want something done to undo the damage they need to identify themselves, or the link which is causing a problem, and I’ll make sure it doesn’t stay on the site, otherwise it stays, leeching their bandwidth forever.

    Reply
  12. neilh

    Re: oops

    Yes, I’d always considered this enough of a backwater of the internet that noone would really be that bothered by the extra two hits they got from such a direct link….remembering the referrer logs from the photos I posted a while ago there were perhaps 20 people bothering to look at the main entry, less reading any comments made, well, at least I guess someone checks their referrer logs.

    AnonCommentor: If you have a problem, please identify yourself, otherwise things will not get fixed….if you don’t want to do that publically you can always mail me – I’m not setting out to cause problems, I’m open to sorting them out, but pragmatically there is nothing I can do right now. btw, if you’re talking about the kogyaru link which gave me a javascript popup, you’ve only got yourself to blame – I wouldn’t have bothered linking at all if that popup wasn’t there.

    Reply

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