The Quest for the Perfect Form Factor
Published by Steve Litchfield at 20:32 UTC, May 18th 2009
Steve Litchfield explores the notion that there's one perfect form factor 'to rule them all'. A form that could suit everyone. And he has an answer, though don't hold your breath if you think you might see other form factors fading away anytime soon....
Over the years, personal and mobile computing has taken many, many forms, and, fifteen YEARS after Psion (with the Series 3) and Apple (with the Newton) started the whole thing off, we STILL haven't reached a point of agreement as to the 'perfect' form factor.
- What about the classic clamshell PDA, whose form factor lives on in the likes of the Nokia E90?
- What about the one-piece tablet, today represented by a variety of designs from Apple, HTC, even Nokia and Samsung?
- What about the clamshell phone, made popular by Motorola and still with its fans, though devices like RIM's Blackberry Pearl and Nokia's 6650 do seem to appeal more to non power users?
- What about the classic slider, pioneered in the smartphone world by Nokia and epitomised by the legendary N95 that I'm currently using to shoot The Phones Show?
- What about the traditional candy bar phone form, no moving parts and hugely rugged but with some compromises in terms of the size of screen and keypad?
- What about the comparatively new form factor of the thumb keyboarded candy bar, with full (but tiny) qwerty input?
- Finally, what about hybrid side sliding devices like the Nokia N97, HTC Touch Pro2 and others, each aiming to combine a full touch screen with a full mechanical qwerty keyboard?
Phew! Which is the 'perfect' form factor?
The obvious answer is that there isn't one that can suit everybody, for every occasion. But I can draw out some thoughts on the form factor that has the most potential and which is perhaps what we'll all be using in the future.
You'll remember, from various articles in the past, how I've levelled several accusations (e.g. here) at touch-screen technology and listed various drawbacks. I stand by my comments at the time, but the technology itself has moved on and some of the issues are not as severe.
For example, screen contrast in sunlight. All colour touch-enabled screens in 2006 were simply terrible outdoors - but we now have capacitive touch technology, meaning that you can use a full transflective display with plain glass over the top and rely on capacitive touch to handle input. For example, the Apple iPhone, whose display is stunning in the sun.
Then there's fragility. Although a touch-screen phone will naturally be a little more prone to damage than a non-touch device, there are other factors involved. The non-touch device may itself have sliders, ribbons, buttons and other points of failure, while the touch-screen phone can, potentially, have almost no moving parts. Again the iPhone is a good example, although the HTC Touch Diamond 2, the HTC Magic and the Nokia 5800 also hold up in this regard, for example.
I've criticised touch screens for being hard to use one-handed and while walking - these are still valid worries, but the use of a narrow-enough, phone-like body, the addition of haptic feedback (e.g. vibration pulses), and the use of a virtual keypad (i.e. T9) as one of the input methods, have all made it possible to use a phone like the Nokia 5800 more or less as you would a traditional candy-bar keypad model, even while walking.
However, I don't want to get fixated on touch here. What I'm about to say has less to do with touch-control and more to do with the possibilities created by having a large screen that can be customised when needed to mimic conventional hardware interfaces.
A simple dial pad is the clearest example of this. Why have a physical number pad that takes up many square centimetres of space when you can bring up a virtual keypad when needed on part of the screen:
Or, with qwerty input, why have the expense, bulk and complexity of a 30-something key mechanical keyboard when you can implement the same thing, at the same size, on a full-sized screen, in software:
Most applications on a phone benefit a lot from screen resolution and real estate. The obvious candidates are web browsers, photo galleries, video players, games, office applications, mapping programs.... oh heck, just about every application benefits from a larger, more detailed screen.
It should be noted that I'm not heading down an iPhone alley here - large, full-face screens existed on smartphones long before Jonathan Ives picked up his pencil to sketch out the iPhone's form. Look at, for example, the O2 XDA in 2002 or the Nokia 7710 in 2004, both shown below. Both relied on stylus input and control, that being the thinking of the time.
Which, I guess, is one more potential drawback of modern touchscreens - Apple took the brave step of saying "Hey, greasy fingerprints be damned, let's just try using our fingers after all", a gamble that has paid off handsomely. It turns out that most of us (especially in these Swine Flu days) do like to keep our hands fairly clean after all, washing them regularly and helping to avoid getting a touchscreen too dirty. And in any case, most phones these days have cases which are just as glossy - fingerprints aren't just a problem on the screen anymore. Wiping your phone down is now just as much part of regular routine as cleaning your glasses or washing your contact lenses, for example.
There are two problems with using software keyboards, of course. There's the aforementioned need for haptic feedback, so that your fingers can 'feel' when their input has been detected. This never works as well as mechanical keys, but then we're talking about tradeoffs here. A Nokia 5800, Blackberry Storm or iPhone-like landscape qwerty virtual keyboard, if implemented with haptic feedback and writing/spelling aids, should be able to at least compete with mechanical keyboards, if not triumph over them. And their ace in the hole is that at the tap of an icon that same screen real estate can be used for playing a video, reading an email or looking at a web page.
So what would the 'perfect' device look like? As I've mentioned several times, just look at the smartphones used in the 24th century in Star Trek - simple tablet-like devices with full-face multi-functional AMOLED screens. There's your vision of the future. What? It's not real? OK, back to the real world and the ancestor of this feature, a slightly controversial piece by yours truly on AAS from almost two years ago - "I've seen the future and it will look a lot like an iPhone". Much of what I said then still applies and has hopefully been expanded on above. Except that we now have over 20 months additional device history and hindsight to draw on.
The Samsung i8910 (Omnia HD), playing a graphics-accelerated 3D game
So.... Take the Samsung i8910(since this is closest to what I have in mind). Let's recap the essentials, but add my suggested improvements along the way):
- 3.7" full-face, nHD AMOLED colour screen (very impressive indoors and in indistinct light, but I'd like to see a change to transflective technology - a la Nokia N95 or iPhone - would improve things by allowing use of the camera functions when the sun is out.)
- Capacitive glass-fronted touchscreen (no explicit multi-touch, as far as we know, but this would be needed for better performance in the on-screen landscape qwerty keyboard, in conjunction with more intelligent keyboard drivers)
- Stereo speakers, 3.5mm audio out, DNSe 2.0 + Dolby 5.1 surround sound [in a phone?!? - boggle]
- 256MB of RAM, 16GB of flash storage plus microSD
- HSDPA, HSUPA, tri-band 3G, quad-band GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS
- Decent capacity 1500mAh battery
- 8 megapixel stills camera with full 720p HD video capture
- 600MHz processor plus OMAP 3 hardware graphics acceleration (you'll notice I haven't annotated the last six bullet points, the i8910 pretty much matches what's needed in all these areas)
- S60 5th Edition (this does the job, but there are still plenty of rough edges to be smoothed out, especially in regard to touch-optimisation on a full-screen device)
As Rafe is fond of saying though, there's more to a smartphone than just the raw specs and a next generation device will have to have the most intuitive interface (think iPhone and more), the most comprehensive operating system and full multitasking (think Symbian Foundation, for example), and a thriving ecosystem of software and services (again think iPhone but with a wider-ranging and better managed App Store).
However, this is a feature about form factor - musings on the ideal software platform will have to wait for another day.
Back in 2009, looking at matches for this full-screened tablet form factor, in order of ascending price, we find the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, the HTC Magic, the HTC Touch Diamond 2, the Apple iPhone, and the Samsung i8910 (Omnia HD) - none of these bar the last get close to the perfect underlying specification and it's too early to call on the Omnia HD because we've yet to see its production software. Still, those five devices do offer something for everyone:
| Full-screened tablets | Nokia 5800 | HTC Magic | HTC Touch Diamond 2 | Apple iPhone 3G* | Samsung i8910 (Omnia HD) |
| Price | circa £230 SIM-free | only on contract so far | circa £380 SIM-free | circa £390 SIM-free | circa £530 SIM-free |
| Runs | S60 5th Edition, Symbian OS | Android | Windows Mobile 6.1 | iPhone OS (subset of Mac OS X) | S60 5th Edition, Symbian OS |
| Screen | 3.2" Resistive, 360x640 pixels, TFT | 3.2" Capacitive, 320x480 pixels, TFT | 3.2" Resistive, 480x800 pixels, TFT | 3.5" Capacitive, 320x480 pixels, Transflective | 3.7" Capacitive, 360x640 pixels, AMOLED |
| Radios | HSDPA, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, FM | HSDPA, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS | HSDPA, HSUPA, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS | 3G, Wi-Fi, (very limited) Bluetooth, GPS | HSDPA, HSUPA, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, FM |
| Camera | 3 megapixels, VGA video @30fps | 3 megapixels. QVGA video(?) | 5 megapixels, VGA video @15fps | 2 megapixels fixed focus | 8 megapixels, 720p HD video @30fps |
| Processing | 369 MHz | 528 MHz | 528 MHz | 412 MHz, plus PowerVR graphics acceleration | 600 MHz, plus OMAP3 graphics acceleration |
| Memory | 128MB RAM, 80MB user flash, plus microSD | 288MB RAM/user flash | 288MB RAM/user flash | 128MB RAM, 16GB user flash | 256MB RAM, 16GB user flash, plus microSD |
* Note that an iPhone with slightly improved spec is rumoured for next month
And yes, I know that there are other devices with similar form factor, from both the feature phone world and the PDA/smartphone world. But the above five are probably the ones that I'd recommend first.
Where does this leave the other form factors mentioned in the introduction above? It certainly doesn't leave them dead - the very fact that so many forms exist after so many years proves that there's a market for each, depending on a user's taste, requirements, lifestyle and pocket.
But, despite my affection for (picking, for example, from each of the form factors mentioned from Nokia's range over the last 3 years) the E90, the 6650, the N95 and the N82, and despite my enthusiasm to give the upcoming N97 a good working over, I do still believe that ultimately - ultimately, when technology and ecosystems have evolved a little further, that we'll all end up using something that looks not unlike the Samsung i8910 (Omnia HD). Whether it will indeed be Samsung or Nokia or LG or HTC or Apple that wins out in the manufacturer battle to create the perfect phone with the perfect form factor, remains to be seen.
Categories: Comment, Hardware
Platforms: Series 80, Series 90, General, S60 3rd Edition, S60 5th Edition
Feature Discussion
I've used the 5800's, N810's, Viewty's, etc virtual keyboard and they just don't 'do it' for me. I don't like the loss of screen space while typing either.
The physical keyboards on the E71, Curve/Bold, Treo are just too small for me. (my idea of hell would be trapped with the Pearls keyboard!!!), so the Pre is simply a non-starter for me.
The E75's keyboard is better, but is like the Motorola's (RAZR) type buttons. Somewhere between real and 'virtual'.
So give me a tablet style phone, with large screen, and slide down/N97 keyboard.
Just my 2c.
Again, my choice of the perfect form factor would be the walky-talky from the Original Star-Trek Series which opened with a “Click”, It some how amused me that N97 made the same click when opened.
Shall we say, “History repeats” or “Futures calling”. You decide…..
Suju.
Because we are talking about devices that *must* have physical keys, and haptics are not that advanced beyond vibrating the entire device, I would say that the HTC Touch Pro/N97 are about as close to making everyone happy as things get.
If I had my call though, the Nintendo DSi would probably be best. Fewer buttons, dual screens, folding, etc. You kind of get everything there except the keyboard.
I think that the OLPC 2 will end up being the best (don't remember if it will have haptics or not). But that dual screen book-like mode will pretty much natch it for just about everyone.
The engagement with the device is immediate and intimate (odd word I know).
Typing is faster (especially in portrait) than I - an old-school hardware QWERTY guy - would ever have thought possible.
The flexibility offered by the big screen is worth the cost of getting used to yet another input method.
So, for those who generate a lot of content on their devices (text docs, spreadsheets etc) I'd say, try a capacitative slate in the future but NOT now: it can work but the problem is that on the best current example (iPhone) the software isn't there to do what we want to do.
The i8910 may fix that - if so, I'm off to Orange. iPhone 3 in June may fix that - QuickOffice in the AppStore, perhaps.
But I'm worried about the absence of multi-touch on the i8910 (BTW, how does the pictured 3D FPS work with only one-finger to control movement?). iPhone's battery and multi-tasking are weak and, while the N97 looks good, I've never found resistive screens to be responsive enough (although to be fair, the TyTn II and N810 were the last ones I tried for any length of time).
In short: the slate is the future.
Steve - I need that i8910 review. Holding off on a new phone is killing me!
Finally, because I don't post often: thanks for the site and, especially, the podcasts: always informative and often funny too (especially those moments where you can almost hear Steve's eyes rolling at another Ewan pun!)
using the bb storm is great for standard phone usage even emails and sms are great on it, better in my view than on the iphone. but when i go on the internet the browser just lets it down compared to the likes of the nokia s60 3rd edition browser where i can just scroll to and click on what i want.
the best design so far for me is the sony ercisson p1 which had both touch screen and keyboard, i know a lot of people prefere the p910 where you had a full screen, with the flip keyboard attachment if you wanted. but the full qwerty split in half made typing far faster than anyhting else i have used.
im waiting on the palm pre where we have the full touch screen to do stuff as you can on the g2 and iphone, but with the option of the qwerty for us old fashioned people who just like the feel of a keyboard allowing us to type quickly
as the "sliding keyboard" of the TyTN 2/ N97/ N810 WASTES a lot of keyboard space for *NO DISCERNABLE BENEFIT*!
The E90, slightly WIDER, i.e. about 6.5/7 cm with a touchscreen that comes as close to the edges as possible , without losing the internal VidCam, would be preferable.
I was of the firm opinion that the licensed Psion hinge of the Psion 5/ Revo was a design classic that could never be matched but must say that apart from the "click" as it changes mode, the E90 has a very elegant facsimile.
Thus I'd want a Wider, flatter (less 'brick-like') E90 with an internal WVGA Touchscreen and configurable UI that allows the selection of both larger icons for finger-driven navigation and smaller UI elements/ "buttons" for those of us that prefer to use the Stylus for more PDA-style usage.
The OMAP 3 with the attendant Cortex and associated coprocessors should be mandatory like the Samsung i8910 HD, and the internal flash memory of at least 32 GB should be matched with a 512 MB of RAM, leaving about 372 of RAM free after booting-up. "Demand Paging" should be implemented , and the option of allocating more memory to e.g. the web browser should be user-configurable (within reasonable parameters).
The outer screen could be the e75 or even n95 one but doesn't neeed touch.
How about this:
Updated version of the i8910 with 32gb RAM, slide sliding keyboard and detachable front keypad (think like the P800).
Or you can do the same thing with slightly larger keyboard (ala E90) - outside keypad, inside display touch + full keyboard (think Series 60 5th edition E90) but with more memory and CPU.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/11/l...ok-you-choose/
Regards jApi NL
Feature-wise it needs the specs of the i8910 at least.
Imagine that phone update with modern technology. The design of those phone allow a "full" camera lens/optic on the swivel part. So you know it will have the best camera/video.
The front of the phone can be a full touch display with that can be rotated to many possible angles.
The internal keypad can be updated to a qwerty keypad. If you've ever hacked the phone to play N-Gage or just playing any games, you know it is fabulous.
The N91/N92/N93; those phones are the perfect form factor. Nokia just need to update them to a bigger touch display, put in a qwerty keypad and trim it down a bit.
I'm not so sure resistive has all that much to do with sunlight legibility. The best screen i've used EVER with regards to this is a 7 year old device. Namely the p800. And it had a resistive touch screen. It was so good at reflecting ambient light it didn't even have a backlight. It used some kind of strange front lighting technique.
I'm not so sure resistive has all that much to do with sunlight legibility. The best screen i've used EVER with regards to this is a 7 year old device. Namely the p800. And it had a resistive touch screen. It was so good at reflecting ambient light it didn't even have a backlight. It used some kind of strange front lighting technique.
The N93 was indeed special in many ways. But elegant and mass market it wasn't. I remember talking to a Nokia service engineer who basically ran away screaming whenever he saw someone coming in with an N93 - they were a NIGHTMARE to service and repair. All that twisting and folding made for an incredibly complex device.
One advantage of the tablet form factor is that there are almost no moving parts whatsoever. Simpler servicing, greater reliability, greater elegance. And I speak as an N93 fan.
1. The full screen slate form factor is fabulous for most tasks
2. The supposedly best in class virtual keyboard is no match for a good thumboard (although that might be because I can type unusually fast and accurately on my Blackberry)
3. The virtual keyboard concept falls down completely if you need to create a spreadsheet on the fly. Now I know that not everyone needs to do that, but i find it very hard to keep switching between the sheet view and the little editor box which is all I can see when the keyboard is popped up. Given that spreadsheets are an important part of most businesses this is something that manufacturers should bear in mind when encouraging users to leave the laptop at home and rely on the mobile to get the job done.
With all that said I have to say I would probably switch to the iPhone as a standalone device if the battery was up to a full day of calls and push email, and if the signal strength was better (and I could move it onto Vodafone to use my company SIM). I would miss the multitasking but I think I could live with it.
we still have lots of different types of car but they, almost all, have 4 wheels and a steering wheel. so for phones I guess almost all of us like a touchscreen. hopefully that will become standard. but some of us want a keyboard (big, small, slide, fold, etc) too. no problem we're getting them.
maybe two main types of device then. the tablet and the keyboard. both with touchscreens. let's see how it goes.
however, keyboard and touchscreen hasn't worked for laptops (yet), a touchpad near the keyboard has been more useful. netbooks and slide out qwerty phones are pretty close to each other though in size and form. we'll see.
anybody for a kindle-a-like?
Especially for a non-multitouch device it seems like a must-have. For me it is (next to the flash) the biggest argument against the OmniaHD.