= Hardware = == Size ==
The phone is BIG. There is no other word for it. It makes it even worse when you open the phone and see that a lot of space is wasted: Half of the thickness is taken by the battery, a very small vibrator, 2 small loud speakers and half of the 2 antennas - leaving 50% of half of the phone as empty space. The carrying hole is just making this worse. I am not sure if you could have made the phone slimmer, but it seems that it would have been easy to make room for a battery twice the size. I usually carry my Siemens S55 and my Samsung NV3 camera in one pocket. But swapping the S55 with the Neo is going to take some time getting used to. == The screen == The resolution of the screen is awesome. I still need to try it in sunshine. == The hardware button == There is a hardware button on the left side. But it is hard to press (I have to use force), which will limit its usefulness. Had it been extended a few mm then it is in the perfect location for my thumb and might be useful as a CTRL key. == The power button == To turn the phone on you have to hold the power button for 5 seconds. You get no feedback during this and it is hard to feel if the button is actually pressed. It would have been nice with some feedback. A status LED would be sufficient. == Connecting the USB == I still have doubt whether the USB cable is actually plugged in and the phone charging, because I cannot turn on a completely discharged phone as soon as I plug it in. If my Siemens S55 is completely discharged I plug it in and from that second I can use the phone normally again. An LED on the phone to should it when it was charging and show when it was ready to turn on would help a lot. == The MicroSD holder == Putting the MicroSD card into the phone takes some practice. The holder is very fragile, so you probably only want to do this once and do data transfer via USB/Bluetooth. If this is not improved for the mass market phone the package must contain a "how-to-install-microSD-card" otherwise I predict broken MicroSD holders. = Software = Software is very limited at this point: I have yet to place my first call using the phone. == Placement of buttons == I read from left to right. I will expect most people, who will use the phone, will do that. I believe it is because of this, that I find it natural that if presented with 2 buttons 'previous' and 'next' I will expect 'previous' to on the left side. That is similar to the web browsers I use: Left means back, right means forward. If I click something wrong in the web browser and want to undo that I press back (i.e. left) again. So to me the following actions should be put on the left side: left, undo, back, cancel, previous, no, reject-call and these should be put on the right hand side: right, apply, forward, OK, next, yes, answer-call, do-it
From this I also find the following gestures natural:
Drag-left = backspace Drag-right = space Backspace is similar to undo and if a gesture is needed for the left-grouped buttons then this should be it. The right-grouped buttons should have the opposite (similar to space). == UI improvements == I like to drag things. In the calendar I cannot see the whole day. I have to use the scrollbar (which BTW seems not to be proportionally resized). I would like to simply click on the time and drag that up or down (like when you drag around a PDF file in e.g. Acroread). And do the same with the days in week view. The feedback is bad. I was often in doubt whether I had clicked or not. Using the hour glass icon more would help some but not solve everything. == Application: Screen rotate == This rotates to landscape and back. Neat. But again the feedback is too slow. /Ole _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community