I used to work for RIM and was quite the BB addict for a while, but I hadn't used any BB since the Pearl came out over 2 years ago.
I played around with a friend's Storm yesterday and sadly, didn't like the click-screen. The reason why they need to have something like the click screen is because the BB OS needs to differentiate between selecting an item and clicking on it (in the past done by rolling the trackball and clicking it).
Anyway, I think they could've done much better without a click screen like this:
- Have the screen be touch-only (no click)
- make menu items and dialog buttons about 2x bigger than they are
- have a single touch activate most items: typing, playback buttons in media player, dialog buttons, menu items
- for items which need to differentiate between a select and click (such as a mail message), have a single touch activate the select, while a double-click activate the action.
This would make things a bit more inconsistent (ie, sometimes you won't be sure if somethign needs to be clicked once or twice), but it would mean faster typing, more solid hardware, etc.
I played around with a friend's Storm yesterday and sadly, didn't like the click-screen. The reason why they need to have something like the click screen is because the BB OS needs to differentiate between selecting an item and clicking on it (in the past done by rolling the trackball and clicking it).
Anyway, I think they could've done much better without a click screen like this:
- Have the screen be touch-only (no click)
- make menu items and dialog buttons about 2x bigger than they are
- have a single touch activate most items: typing, playback buttons in media player, dialog buttons, menu items
- for items which need to differentiate between a select and click (such as a mail message), have a single touch activate the select, while a double-click activate the action.
This would make things a bit more inconsistent (ie, sometimes you won't be sure if somethign needs to be clicked once or twice), but it would mean faster typing, more solid hardware, etc.
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