So Nokia has announced the N97 touch screen device with real keyboard—the form factor that RIM should have used for the Storm, and the Steve Jobs will never allow at Apple.
Link to video.
As you can see the screen slides away from the keyboard. This is really the ideal form factor and the one that I've had in mind ever since I saw the iPhone and wondered what RIM and Nokia should do about it. As I've said before, I'm not a fan of touch screen. However, there are quite a few use cases where they are massively better for UE than a directional pad. For example, a web browser.
So the obvious solution is to provide the best of both worlds. I'm pretty surprised that RIM didn't take this approach with the Storm. Their customer's #1 favourite feature after all is the keyboard. Did they think that they had to copy the iPhone too closely? Or maybe they couldn't get the mechanical design to work. Well, this N97 renews my faith that Nokia can still design a great device.
As for the iPhone, I don't think Steve will ever allow this style for the iPhone, as he's too much of a design purist and he obviously hates buttons. The iPhone is a gorgeous lump of solid "metal" & "glass" (how it appear anyway) that expresses a purity of design and function that other companies will struggle to ever match (and probably never succeed). Adding moving parts to that would ruin the experience.
Now if only Nokia would simplify their line-up and naming system. Why not give this phone a NAME? huh? Apple has made their product line simple — even obvious — to understand by providing clearly named products and doing basically what car makers do: upgrading them once a year. Nokia needs to do the same and step away from the numerical and mostly meaningless current system.
And one last thing. They still need to fix the development process for Symbian. It sucks, and it's even more blatently bad now that Apple is making it so ridiculously easy to learn how & develop & market products for the iPhone.
PS One more thing, the last one I promise — Nokia also needs to, starting with this new phone, have a SINGLE firmware version that runs on ALL of the devices worldwide, with a simple update system, so that all users are running exactly the same software. Their current system is so insane I'm not even going to explain how bad it is.
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