Lack of an iPhone keyboad a ‘billion dollar gamble’
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jun 13, 2007 at 10:37am
If there is a billion-dollar gamble underlying Apple’s iPhone, it lies in what this smart cellphone does not have: a mechanical keyboard, according to The New York Times.
“The tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard is a pretty important aspect of human interaction,” Bill Moggeridge, a founder of Ideo, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, California, told the publication. “If you take that away you tend to be very insecure.”
“There has never been a massively successful consumer device based solely on a touch screen,” added Sky Dayton, chief executive of Helio, a cellular network service that has recently introduced an innovative handset that integrates Google maps with a G.P.S. system and another feature that physically locates friends using Helio phones.
“Texting” is central to an entire generation of people, and Apple is taking a risk in not making that a central design feature, Dayton told The Times. “There is a generation of users who are always online and who don’t communicate the way their parents did,” he said. “They’re e-mailing; they’re texting; they’re I.M.-ing.”
J. Scott Anderson Says:
Don, I think that you are right on. Since the days of the first Star Trek epidsodes showing the holo-deck, I have wondered when our devices would start having interfaces that can change according to the need and the user. I think that this is the start of that. A long ways to go, but a start.
Posted on June 13, 2007
Article Information
Comment on this Article Print this Article Email this Article Digg This
Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
Recent Articles
Don Foy Says:
This is the kind of ‘forward’ thinking that brought us:
“No one will ever want a computer at home.” and
“Why would I want to carry my music with me on a portable device?”
“It needs a keyboard” can join right in.
And it’s more great reporting from the Times: “Let’s go find the competition and let them trash the new stuff.”
The pop-up keypad looks like a better solution (to me) than a larger device with a mess of tiny buttons or a regular phone with three letters and a number for each button on it (Maybe I’m just too old to text).
Posted on June 13, 2007