Touching Stories
I’ve been trying and watching others use a variety of touch-screen devices: iPod touch, LG Viewty and LG Chocolate.
The results are mixed.
The Chocolate isn’t a full-on touch device, but uses touch where the function keys would normally be. It mainly works, and certainly makes for a very cool, smooth device. Incidentally, this presumable helps avoid bacterial build up around keys. I’d be interested to try one of these with haptic feedback.
I tried typing my thoughts for a couple of meetings into the iPod Touch Note application, which only works in portrait, so it’s narrow keys time. Sigh. It was a mixed experience. The autocorrection sometimes was worse than none at all, and I suspect that some smart maths could work out rather better which keys I regularly missed with my fat fingers. I don’t think I’d find e-mail very easy with it, but for the odd notes it was acceptable, no more.
I quite like the Viewty, although the interface is quite clunky. The haptic feedback (ie it vibrates when a touch has been recognised) works well, providing some reinforcement, as do the ripples flowing away from your finger. The problem with the Viewty is that it has pretty much ordinary phone software on it, and while they’ve kept the number of options down to a sensible limit per screen, it’s still rather basic. If some of the wackier Flash-style stuff from the iPhone were put onto it, it’d be a much better device, both than it is and the Apple device.
Sonia, my 8-year old daughter, took to the touch screen quite happily and had no problem having fun fiddling about in the way that small children can amuse themselves with nothing much. She also had fun with the iPod Tocuh Maps app, although she regularly got lost in the interface. This confirms that the Panic Button approach just doesn’t work. She didn’t get lost on the Viewty as there is always a Back button on the screen.
Similarly, my dancer/choreographer friend Jonathan, who can’t even reply to SMS messages, was able to master the iPod Touch playlists I’d set up for our show with me simply saying “just press the screen where it says”. He’d have been totally bamboozled by the traditional iPod interface, and any computer media player would have left him mystified.
However, passing the iPod Touch to a very experienced techie person, surrounded as she was with laptops and an HTC PDA with a keyboard. She could not type on the iPod at all and rapidly became very annoyed at it.
So, maybe touch works well for the non-technical? That certainly could be a contributing factor to the US iPhone mania vs the supreme indifference of the mobile savvy Europeans who’ve had phones since birth.
