Mint Usability

RETYPE is a new concept for text input in touchscreen phones/devices. Instead of that huge QWERTY keyboard, which wastes massive amounts of valuable screen estate from your small screen, it relies heavily on gestures. Each key can be used to enter three letters; tap, swipe up and swipe down. It also seems that they have done some optimization regarding the letter positions, the most common letters you can simply tap, the not so common letters you have to swipe.

One potential problem with the concept though: whenever optimized letter positions come to play, the whole keyboard becomes heavily language specific. Now, of course you could optimize the layout for every language but it’s a quite big amount of work. Nevertheless, it’s a intriquing concept.

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HP has realeased this all-new kitchen/media/whatever everything-but-kitchensink computer which you should be able to handle with touch only. That’s touch, as a singular, no multi-touch for this one.

Doesn’t look like surefire to me. Yes, it’s a nice concept and the user interface looks nice. Actually it looks like Windows Media Center with Vista treatment, meaning everything is black. And lots of gloss of course as the trends today dictate.

However, it seems to have usability problems which are bound to cause irritation, like pictures that look like thumbnails that you can open and but, a-ha, you can’t. Touch panel response seems to be another issue. as the device fails to act for every third input, which kinda.. well, sucks.

Though, I must admit, I’m somewhat interested how this will cope up the true world, since I’ve designed, as part of UI design course, somewhat similiar device with touch-only inputs. Maybe I throw in some screenshots of it, at some point. Although, they aren’t too polished, specially when you compare them to device like this. (If I just can find them somewhere, that is. Seem to have misplaced the whole project somewhere.)

Video after the jump, with TouchSmart 2 presentation video, or just head straight to CrunchGear to see more.

Video after the jump.

Read it all from CrunchGear

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