[Geek] Kaizen
Dec. 27th, 2006 03:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenKaizen: Continuous incremental improvement of an activity to eliminate waste.
Spent some time chez![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pmcmurray playing with my phone on his Wifi LAN, which I originally built for him in sunny Walthamstow. The phone, courtesy of dougs and before that from autopope, is an Orange SPV500 (alias O2 XDA Pro, alias T-Mobile MDA Pro, or something like that.) I also used my netBook occasionally, too. They're both good travelling tools: small, light, solid-state, fast enough for what they do, silent and with relatively enormous battery lives.
Interesting that the phone (HTC Universal, AKA Qtek 9000) and the netBook (strictly, a 7Book, i.e., a Series 7 with a netBook ROM DIMM) share a number of design features: StrongARM-family CPU, clamshell design, miniature QWERTY keyboard, 640*480 VGA-res colour LCD, expansion via solid-state cards, wireless networking and infrared, ROM-based OS designed for usage on the move & sync to a PC, including limited file compatibility, and so on.
Yet the late-1990s netBook is in almost every way a better, cleaner, simpler design, with a more flexible and pleasant UI. The WinMob device, despite more than twice the speed, nearly 10x the memory and far more functionality - phone, Bluetooth, integral Wifi, still camera + video camera and so on - feels cobbled-together and very poorly designed and integrated. I adore its functionality - it's a smartphone, camera, MP3 player and usable WLAN Web terminal - but boy does the implementation suck! I had heard that Windows Mobile 5 was finally getting reasonably polished. Yeccch! If this is the polished, refined, 5th-generation product, I really hate to imagine what its rougher predecessors were like! It's appalling!
Understand, I'm not criticizing the form factor of the phone. A subnotebook-sized cell phone would be very silly. I'd rather it was more like a Nokia Communicator in size and shape, to be honest, but even so, its tiny keyboard is utterly dreadful, with a remarkable profusion of design cock-ups. The hotkey to launch IE is right next to the tiny space bar, so every few words you type, you flip into the web browser by mistake. There are no "<" and ">" characters. There's no Control key, so you can't cut/copy/paste, but there are irritating hotkeys for IE, messaging, contacts and other apps built right into the main alphabetic cluster. The separate camera key doesn't open the camera app automatically. There are 2 pairs of make/break call buttons, which screams thoughtless design. And of course you can't use them to enter the phone app or to return to the home screen, as I could on my Symbian phone.
The simplest change would be to move the app hotkeys onto the screen fascia, in accordance with standard handheld PC design. Oh, and bin the duplicate call/hang up keys, while moving the dedicated buttons on the hinge to somewhere accessible with the machine open or closed. There's lots of wasted space around the edge of the screen it would get them out of the alpha cluster, and with the space thus freed up, the keyboard could gain a Control key, a right Shift key, maybe even an Alt key and a right-mouse-button key like a real Windows machine, and still be more spacious and better laid-out!
While I'm at it, the rocker button duplicates the functions of the cursor keys and "OK" key. (Sometimes you hit Enter to select, sometimes "OK". They're different. Hit OK in the wrong place, it closes the app. Only the [X] in the corner doesn't really close the app, it just puts it into the background.)
But no, honest, it's Windows. If you know desktop Windows, you can work this. Yeah, right.
And with all this, the smartphone has about half the battery life of the Psion, with a big fat extended battery fitted.
So much for progress, eh?
Spent some time chez
pmcmurray playing with my phone on his Wifi LAN, which I originally built for him in sunny Walthamstow. The phone, courtesy of dougs and before that from autopope, is an Orange SPV500 (alias O2 XDA Pro, alias T-Mobile MDA Pro, or something like that.) I also used my netBook occasionally, too. They're both good travelling tools: small, light, solid-state, fast enough for what they do, silent and with relatively enormous battery lives.Interesting that the phone (HTC Universal, AKA Qtek 9000) and the netBook (strictly, a 7Book, i.e., a Series 7 with a netBook ROM DIMM) share a number of design features: StrongARM-family CPU, clamshell design, miniature QWERTY keyboard, 640*480 VGA-res colour LCD, expansion via solid-state cards, wireless networking and infrared, ROM-based OS designed for usage on the move & sync to a PC, including limited file compatibility, and so on.
Yet the late-1990s netBook is in almost every way a better, cleaner, simpler design, with a more flexible and pleasant UI. The WinMob device, despite more than twice the speed, nearly 10x the memory and far more functionality - phone, Bluetooth, integral Wifi, still camera + video camera and so on - feels cobbled-together and very poorly designed and integrated. I adore its functionality - it's a smartphone, camera, MP3 player and usable WLAN Web terminal - but boy does the implementation suck! I had heard that Windows Mobile 5 was finally getting reasonably polished. Yeccch! If this is the polished, refined, 5th-generation product, I really hate to imagine what its rougher predecessors were like! It's appalling!
Understand, I'm not criticizing the form factor of the phone. A subnotebook-sized cell phone would be very silly. I'd rather it was more like a Nokia Communicator in size and shape, to be honest, but even so, its tiny keyboard is utterly dreadful, with a remarkable profusion of design cock-ups. The hotkey to launch IE is right next to the tiny space bar, so every few words you type, you flip into the web browser by mistake. There are no "<" and ">" characters. There's no Control key, so you can't cut/copy/paste, but there are irritating hotkeys for IE, messaging, contacts and other apps built right into the main alphabetic cluster. The separate camera key doesn't open the camera app automatically. There are 2 pairs of make/break call buttons, which screams thoughtless design. And of course you can't use them to enter the phone app or to return to the home screen, as I could on my Symbian phone.
The simplest change would be to move the app hotkeys onto the screen fascia, in accordance with standard handheld PC design. Oh, and bin the duplicate call/hang up keys, while moving the dedicated buttons on the hinge to somewhere accessible with the machine open or closed. There's lots of wasted space around the edge of the screen it would get them out of the alpha cluster, and with the space thus freed up, the keyboard could gain a Control key, a right Shift key, maybe even an Alt key and a right-mouse-button key like a real Windows machine, and still be more spacious and better laid-out!
While I'm at it, the rocker button duplicates the functions of the cursor keys and "OK" key. (Sometimes you hit Enter to select, sometimes "OK". They're different. Hit OK in the wrong place, it closes the app. Only the [X] in the corner doesn't really close the app, it just puts it into the background.)
But no, honest, it's Windows. If you know desktop Windows, you can work this. Yeah, right.
And with all this, the smartphone has about half the battery life of the Psion, with a big fat extended battery fitted.
So much for progress, eh?
