Flying to Dallas on my way
to the Texas Instruments
Developer Conference in
February, I was reminded
of the importance of using the products
you design. This is much easier with
consumer products, but hands-on
experience is often the only way
to see the advantages or flaws of a
particular design choice.
I have been using Samsung’s
Q1B and iGo’s Stowaway Bluetooth
keyboard for a number
of months now, finding clear
pros and cons along the way
(see the figure). The combination has significant advantages
in tight spaces like airplanes, especially since my large frame
takes up a bit of space.
Writing articles while flying with the latest laptops that
Penton Media has decided to give its editors is nearly impossible
unless you can hunt and peck with a keyboard in your
gut or you have the luxury of flying first class. Unfortunately,
neither works for me. On the plus side for Penton, it now gets a
little more work out of me while I’m crossing the country.
The advantages of a more compact design tend to be obvious.
The disadvantages—and solutions to those disadvantages—
aren’t always as easy to find unless you use the products for
an extended period of time.
LITTLE SCREEN, BIG ANNOYANCE
One of the biggest problems that needs to be addressed, image
control and zooming, is common with cell phones. Apple’s
iPhone provides good image control and zooming, but given its
screen size, its available options are limited.
Such options are significantly greater on devices that provide
more screen real estate, such as the Q1B and other ultramobile
PCs (UMPCs). While the iPhone typically needs the
whole display for data, the Q1B has enough space for decorations,
i.e., controls.
Making these decorations on the Q1B too large, though,
takes space away from the content that you’re trying to view.
Likewise, the screen is too small to show more than one or two
items, such as articles, at a time. In fact, viewing Web pages
with numerous columns tends to be tedious at best.
I want more control over what is being presented. I also want
the ability to zoom and orient the display at will, which is key
because flipping from portrait to landscape is physically trivial.
Furthermore, it should be automatic or require a couple of
screen
taps instead of the time-consuming
process it currently uses.
This is true of all of the UMPCs I
have looked at.
How should this work? Let’s
take viewing an article on a Web
page as an example, starting
with a full view of the Web pages
on the screen. In this case, the
layout of the page would be easy to see, but the details would
be impossible to read because most of the text would be tiny.
The obvious way to address the issue is to tap a control and
then tap the article to be viewed and have it fill the screen.
The problem with current Web sites and browsers is that
presentation and layout are inherent in the Web page design,
and there is no clue to the logical relationship of something
like an article embedded within the page. This problem was
apparent to me when viewing Slashdot recently.
Slashdot has moved to a control panel that remains in the
upper left corner even as you scroll through a list of articles or
comments. It uses a minor amount of space on a standard LCD
screen but a sizable chunk on the portrait view of the Q1B.
As it turns out, this problem is similar to viewing content
in general, such as viewing a full-page PDF on anything but
a very large screen. It can be done, but navigation is a chore.
It boils down to the fact that the user is not in control and the
system is not trying to make things easier for the user.
WHAT’S NEXT
I would expect the UMPC market to make a sizable dent in the
portable computer industry if this particular nuisance can be
better addressed. But for this discussion, the regular use of the
system presented the problem and the solution.
Of course, playing with the actual product isn’t always
required or practical. On the other hand, a simulation may be.
Check out the Embedded in Electronic Design section (p. 55,
56) in this issue for more on simulation technology.
Meanwhile, it’s time to do some reading. The Q1B does this
best in portrait mode using HTML with the decorations
stripped away so it flows, whereas PDF files do not. Here’s to
hoping that someone addresses this problem for me and all of
the other UMPC users.