It's All About Symbian Insight 21, a.k.a. audio podcast 70, in which we cover Skype Mobile, the new Nokia 5320 XpressMusic, new announcements in the world of Web Runtime and widgets, plus a discussion on whether touchscreen devices that require two hands to use will take off in the mainstream. Listen here.
Read on in the full article.
Err, wasn't your last podcast no 70 and insight 21 as well?
[cough] Err... yes. Rafe copied and pasted the details from the last podcast and forgot to change them 8-)
Now fixed, after a fashion!
Funnily enough the advert served up when I first noticed was 'Should have gone Specsavers'
Could you add it to the RSS feed please, so I can download it to the podcasting app
Great podcast as ever. 😊
Styluses aren't THAT bad, if you want or need to do fine selection tasks: in photos, in certain games, in drawing, and for navigating certain websites. Look at how well the stylus-based Nintendo DS has done as a mass market device, ordinary people clearly aren't afraid of using such devices.
And perhaps most importantly, as the podcast quite rightly mentions, many Asian countries use complex pictograms instead of simple alphabets so they need a stylus to allow text to be easily inputted. Over the past few years Nokia's had plenty of Asia-only models (including a Symbian UIQ model) which have had touchscreens and styluses for precisely this reason. The Asian phone market is probably going to be bigger than the European and American markets put together, so this isn't some obscure issue.
I'm not saying styluses are great for everything, I just don't see the harm in allowing fingers AND styluses on a touch interface for those who want/need to use them.
I think the current wave of stylusphobia and buttonphobia is largely because of Apple trying to find some hook for the hype of the iPhone, which is (like all expensive phones) a niche product. When all that has calmed down we'll still see pretty much the same variety of different phone types as always, there won't be any homogenous "ultimate" phone type.