On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Petri Ojala wrote:
> From my own perspective the only use I can think of is to have them around
> in the car, boat, etc. and use it in the case of emergency, but then again,
> you don't know if the battery will be dried out when you really need it.
> For other purposes, well, messaging is already over half of my mobile usage
> and it's not about being able to call but more about being reachable by
> others.
Right. If these would let me receive calls, they'd be well worthwhile. I'd
pay $30 to be reachable during a two or three day trip to a city where
my keitai doesn't work.
But I would think that there'd also be a market for these (as has been
pointed out here before, I believe) amongst people who, for whatever
reason, don't want to be tracked. Given that it seems the American telcos
are intent on tracking the number and location of every call ever made and
keeping the data forever, and the noises about mandatory GPS in phones,
this really comes as a goodsend for certain people.
As for the small keyboards, I think that they're being introduced because
they work, and work well. I was very skeptical about the keyboard on the
Blackberry when I first used it, but in "two-thumb" mode it's noticably
faster for English input than any other hardware I've used in something
that size.
The only real disappointment I've had in small-form-factor input methods
lately is the complete lack of direct kanji input on the Palm and other
Palm-like devices. The technology to do this has been around for years,
and works well on something with that sort of processing power. Can it
be that too many years of typing romaji truly has degraded the ability
Japanese to write kanji to the point they couldn't use such a thing?
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 3 5778 0123 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
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Received on Tue Dec 4 05:17:03 2001