Palm Pre Owners Want On-Screen Keyboards, Too
A recent survey of Palm Pre owners found that a large number of them want the addition of an on-screen keyboard. The Pre has the physical QWERTY keyboard, but users want a soft keyboard for entering short bits of text as needed. This fires up the old debate of “physical keyboard vs. on-screen keyboard,” but that’s not the issue here. The real issue is ease of use — we smartphone owners want it.
The same debate reared up over T-Mobile’s G1, the original Android phone with a physical keyboard. Owners liked the keyboard but wanted an on-screen version to pop up whenever appropriate, such as for entering quick bits of text. Google listened, and the latest version of Android added a soft keyboard to keep everyone happy. What drove this apparent fickleness in G1 owners is the same thing driving Pre owners. It’s all about ease of use — whatever is easiest to get the task done, that’s what we want. It’s pretty straightforward.
It’s not a “physical keyboard OR soft keyboard” issue, it’s really about wanting a physical keyboard AND a soft one. We just want to get the job done, the easy way.
(via electronista)
IIRC, the issue with the G1 wasn’t necessarily quick bits of text, but entering text when holding the cellphone in landscape mode.
Well put…I want both.
I’d like just a soft keyboard. Keep the current shape, but load it with a bigger battery. Then again, I don’t doing much outbound typing at this point, mostly reading.
I returned the PRE, primarily due to the keyboard. I don’t really need a hardware keyboard and thought the PRE’s to be tight and awkward to slide out.
We want what works for us, and we’re all unique.
I just made a Genius bar appointment to have a physical keyboard installed on my iPhone 3G
Let us know how that works out for you.
There are many things missing from the Pre, this isn’t one of them.
WRT soft keyboard on the G1, its unusable. The screen on the Pre cannot fit one that will have large enough keys for our thumbs.
Users think they want all kinds of stuff. I hope this is at the bottom of the list for Palm.
@silvan is right. A touchscreen keyboard would not necessarily increase usability at all for the Pre. I’m a Pre user, and I didn’t see this survey of Pre users. Here’s my 2 cents.
While of equal pixel resolution to the larger iPhone screen (which has an on-screen keyboard), the Pre’s screen is far too small in terms of centimeters to accommodate a usable keyboard. Any on-screen keyboard would barely leave one or two lines of text for composing a message (as it is on the iPhone, there’s room for about 3 lines of text when using the landscape mode keyboard).
Combining the hardware keyboard with the touchscreen provides an excellent and sophisticated user interface that would not be possible with a touchscreen keyboard. Selecting text is accomplished by holding down a physical key (the shift key) and dragging on the touchscreen. Precise movement of the cursor in a text input field is accomplished with this method as well (while holding the Orange key). A touchscreen keyboard would lose this functionality, or it would have to remap these functions in some different, inconsistent (and therefore confusing) way.
Finally, there is just not a compelling reason to implement a touchscreen keyboard. Composing messages and typing on the included hardware keyboard is not at all difficult. There is at most a negligible inconvenience when flipping from landscape to portrait, and opening the flip, to use the included hardware keyboard. It’s not worth making fundamental changes to the platform to alleviate this inconvenience.
These people are out to lunch. That screen on the Pre is way too small for an onscreen keyboard.
The thing that kills the Pre is the battery life. I really like the thing, but it has me thinking of going back to using my Blackberry because it barely gets me through the day.
If Palm’s going to work on anything for this phone, they need to work on squeezing more out of that battery. Touch keyboards should be the least of their worries.