I might be jumping the gun on this, but . . .
I’ve had a Treo 650 for years and, coincidentally, my biggest complaint about the Treo is the same as my biggest complaint about the iPhone - touchscreen dialing.
The Treo has had touchscreen dialing forever. It sucks. I find myself dialing with the Treo’s miniscule keypad more than the touchscreen buttons and that’s only if I don’t have someone stored in speed dial.
Touchscreen dialing sucks. The iPhone touchscreen will be no different.
How do I know? I know because touchscreen dialing provides no feedback to your fingers. Human fingers like feedback.
Apple has touted their touchscreen as “revolutionary” and brags that it will be a monumental inferface just like the iPod clickwheel. Don’t count on it, at least not for phone dialing.
Steve Jobs recent presentation on the iPhone showed some admittedly cool things that the touchscreen can do like resizing pictures. Guess what? Although the features are cool, they provide no feedback to your fingers. Finger feedback is good for phone dialing.
If you have a standard button style keypad for your phone, I bet you can dial a good bit of the phone numbers you know without looking at the keypad. Most of you probably have your speed dial numbers memorized and can locate the number on your keypad by feel without even looking at the phone. If you’re like me, you arrange your speed dial numbers by pattern or location on the keypad instead of numerical order, afterall it’s way easier to think “upper left corner button” for an important number than it is to try to remember the number itself.
You will never be able to do this with the iPhone. There may be other options to help you locate numbers quickly like voice dial, but you will never be able to locate numbers on your iPhone keypad by touch.
This will suck. It sucks on my Treo and it will suck on the iPhone.
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have you got already an iPhone? very nice your keybord… between some months you’re still use these freakin stupid button… and… you.. spent all your money for a palm that make phone calls and some photo with crappy software… if i was in you i start to collect money from now…
pu on May 10th, 2007 at 6:47 am | Link
People need to realize that some people are gonna love the iPhone and others are going to hate it. Stop trying to convert poeple to think like you. I too have a treo 650 and I don’t use the touch dialing but that’s because my stupid screen is cracked and it doesn’t respond to my fingers anymore. Stop bitching about not having to LOOK at the screen to dial a number. With something so beautiful, why would you NOT want to look at it??
Robbie L. on May 10th, 2007 at 7:34 am | Link
Robbie L. said:
[quote]I too have a treo 650 and I don’t use the touch dialing but that’s because my stupid screen is cracked and it doesn’t respond to my fingers anymore. Stop bitching about not having to LOOK at the screen to dial a number. With something so beautiful, why would you NOT want to look at it??[/quote]
It’s a phone, not art or porn. Those may be worth staring at. Phones - not so much. Phones should be functional first, aesthically pleasing second.
Why would I not want to look at a phone to dial a number? Possibly to avoid wrecking people (including myself) while driving?
Robbie, at least your Treo has an alternative method to dial if the screen is broken. With iPhone, when the screen breaks as it is bound to do for many people, you’re out of luck. Better throw a couple of bucks a month onto your contract for insurance or get ready to slap down really big bucks to get the screen fixed.
With no alternative to touchscreen dialing, you’re up the creek if your screen breaks. Don’t you agree?
Well, personally, that’s something I’m wiling to compromise on to use an iPhone. Regarding your issue of dialing while driving, well, most new vehicles nowadays offer bluetooth pairing so you can use voice dailing as opposed to using the actual phone. Using a number pad to dial numbers is so last century, man. Besides, you aren’t suposed to be on your phone while driving! Until I gues to use the darn thing, I don’t have any complaints.
Robbie L. on May 10th, 2007 at 9:41 am | Link
I own an iPhone and the qwerty keypad sucks, bigtime!. If your are fond of texting or using your phone a lot for typing such as emails. Then you will be better off with with an ipod and a fullpledge phone.
But it looks cool though and the look of your jealous drooling friends is worth the effort.
chubaka on October 20th, 2007 at 9:01 pm | Link
I have an iPhone and I’ve had no trouble. Yes, you can’t really dial while driving as easily as you could with a traditional mobile, but c’mon. how often do you really do that? If you HAD an iPhone when you wrote this article, you would have already known how easy it is to have all of your address book uploaded to your phone so you almost NEVER have to use the dial pad.
People are also saying that the keyboard sucks and while I agree that it should have a Landscape option when texting (like in the Safari App), the brilliant program that Apple has developed to predict what you are typing and to also learn strange words that you may regularly type makes the keyboard WAY better than any other I’ve used.
The only problem I had in the beginning was a lack of faith. Yes Faith. Now that I know that I can type as fast as I want and 99% of the time the keyboard already knows hat I want to type, I have no problems.
Brian W. Roberts on March 13th, 2008 at 10:12 pm | Link
Although I agree that you cannot please everyone, it does seem to me that in order to at least make an attempt to please as many as possible, the Iphone (with the high reputation it has) could very well offer the usual number pad for texting, as well as the qwerty keyboard system. I know of many people that did not purchase the iphone SOLELY because of this. These phones do not come cheap so wouldn’t only make sense to offer this choice to the consumer? It could only if the sales..a great deal!
Marci Venice on January 31st, 2010 at 9:28 pm | Link