Lazy8s said:
Fingers aren't rigid blocks of stone. The skin naturally gives a little under pressure, presumably enough to comfortably access the top row of keys. Samsung's generally pretty competent at ergonomic and aesthetic design.
...and yet I repeat: "Who would want to continually wedge their fingers against a solid object every time they want to hit a top-row key?" That's simply uncomfortable, annoying, and gets in the way of one's typing pattern. And it's also completely avoidable for most people if they gave it, like, half a centimeter more room. (Excepting for people with long nails, who will have no choice but to hit those keys with their nail, as their thumbnails would get in the way still anyway, and every other finger couldn't do the "typing from above." They'd basically have to hit those keys sideways. But with nails that long, they have to expect problems all over the place anyway.
)
It's not remotely an ergonomic triumph, but like I said much will depend on what they price it as. If they can bring it out as just "high quality normal cell phone" levels, then people can expect trade-offs like that. But if they are bringing it out at Blackberry or Treo-like levels, then they can expect to be held in direct comparison to the comfort and convenience of those types of devices. (And from what I've seen so far, phones with any kind of built-in QWERTY are on the high end.) The Sidekick I and II are built with texting heavily in mind and they have a somewhat similar problem, except their screen edge seems to be both a bit thinner and certainly more bevelled, but more importantly the top row of keys are exclusively numbers (and lesser-used punctuations), which are also the "least likely to get in the way when texting quickly." They do, however, show that one can certainly get away with a design that shifts the
screen more than
that even on an expensive device.
And that is basically my point.
The aesthetic design is great, but the ergonomics took a bit of a back seat compared to other text-heavy devices. If they can ship this for uder $200, then excellent! If, however, it's more in the $300-400 area as I expect... I think people's standards and desires for such a device are somewhat different than Samsung delivers here.
I also with they had one or two overlarge buttons the right hand side (when held in that horizontal screen position) for better use with gaming, but then MY standards are differet, too.