Satoshi's Wireless Weblog: User Interface is an Art: Color BlackberryConnie and I just got the new color Blackberry. An unremarkable thing for me. I’m always getting a new gadget, but I have to confess, these are pretty good.
The email software hasn’t change essentially at all (thank goodness). Still super intuitive. I love the way that various keys get overloaded for different functions. Rather than the rote, if the key normally does nothing useful. Some examples:
* When you are in a email field and you hit the space bar, it puts in an @ sign on the first space and a . on the second. Think about it, space is not meaningful in most email names and you don’t have to hunt for the @ or the .
* If you are in a field that can’t take a text edit, then the key does something. This is much like the way “vi” works in Unix (maybe why I like it). As an example, if you are reading mail, then pressing “r” does a reply. Get it?
* What is not so good is that the phone stuff is pretty clearly written by someone witha style guide in hand (yuck). Good example, if you hit the phone button (which is BTW, at the top of the thing, I’m not sure why?), then you get to a list of previous calls and the most recent call is highlighted. THat’s great. But, if you type say a “1”, then it doesn’t just jump into the phone call mode. Isn’t that logical. If there isn’t an entry with a “1” in it on the most recently called list, I’m probably trying to enter a phone number. Should just jump into one time dial mode. Rather than requiring going up to the one time dial field, pressing enter. I’m sure the style police hate the idea that a number will do something different, but it is natural at least to me.
* Other bizarre thing is that if you are looking at the recently used list and see say “Steve Hooper,” you’d think that hitting “s” would get you to his name. Instead, it jumps to the contact list and you are looking at all the S’s in the address book and you are wondering what happened to Steve. You can only scroll to get the list. Net, net, if you are on a screen and you hit a key, it should get you to the first entry IMHO.
* Use of color and fonts. It has a zillion fonts, but the default font (SYSTEM 9) is super small to my eyes. Don’t know why they did this.
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