Ahh personal preferences…how they vary.
As should be obvious by now, I have a good number of phones with various forms and various interface types, so I figured I’d rant a bit. Why not…noone else is reading this anyways.
There are 4 main forms of phones these days: candy bar, flip, slider, and communicator (I’ll use this for both slide-out and folding communicators). Each have benefits, and downsides. I’ve used them all, I hate them all, but atleast I hate one less than the rest.
The candy bar form is popular outside of America (though I’m not sure if candy bar or slider are the bigger sellers in Europe right now). It allows you to look down and see your screen, access the keys, and generally use the device only ever requiring a single hand. It’s quick and convenient. The downsides here are the exposed screen and the fact that if you want a decent sized screen, it either hurts key size, or leads to a bigger device. Everything becomes a tradeoff.
Flip phones…America’s favorite. Honestly I used to prefer flips. They protect the screen, they allow for both a decent screen size AND decent key size which still keeping a fairly small size when flipped closed. Unfortunately as I’ve transitioned from feature phones to smart phones there’s the downside that your main screen is hidden. Most flips these days have some sort of cover-ui that shows something on a small outer screen (the N75 lets you control music, and read SMS’s) but usually it’s not much, and nowhere near the information you get on the “real” screen inside. There’s also the added requirement of generally needing two hands to open them, atleast if you want to do so without risking scratching your screen with a thumb nail (seen it happen FAR too many times) and generally requires a lot of fumbling.
Sliders are somewhere in between these two. You have the upside of being able to have both a large screen and decently large keys, while still closing down to a decently pocketable size. They’re generally easier to open one-handed, and give you easy access to your information at just a glance. They do keep the candy bar’s downside of an easily scratched screen however, so they’re not perfect. Also there’s the reason I originally shunned sliders - far too often the screen doesn’t slide up far enough, leaving the top row of buttons cramped which hurts touch-typing/dialing.
And lastly in my over generalized writeup, are the communicators. Most have the same downsides of the flip phone, but with the added size downside of a candy bar that tries to squeeze in a large screen. The cover-ui is usually dumbed down to the point of only being able to make or answer a call, and any real use of the phone requires opening them up. Obviously a larger qwerty keyboard and room for a bigger screen are the plusses here. But with the size and weight additions that communicators generally come with, they lose quite a few points right off the bat. One exception I’ll note is the Nokia E90 - the first communicator I’ve ever actually wanted. The cover-ui isn’t a cover ui, but rather a full on QVGA screen with full access to the OS, and opening the device up just transfers to the internal screen (in the E90’s case, a monstrous 800×352 resolution…). I’m not sure if I could ever use one of these as my daily phone, but I’ll be honest with myself and say yeah, I’ll probably end up having one for the collection…never know when I’ll need to do some work on it after all.
I suppose part 2 will be coming soon, talking about interfaces (various 1-handed interfaces, as well as touch screen)…
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