Touch Screen Phones

I've seen a couple of postings recently talking about whether touch screen really is better than a keyboard for a phone: this one on Nokia Conversations and this one on All About Symbian. It's confirmed my suspicions about my recent purchase of a Samsung i8910 HD.

I've had a Nokia 6760 for a while now, I posted about that back in November last year when I bought it and I liked it a lot.

As a result, and although I know it's unfashionable, I now like Symbian on my phone. It's been around a long while and there's a lot of apps out there. For example whereas the likes of Android are only just getting tethering sorted and I think it's still banned on the iPhone range we've had Joiku on Symbian for quite some time now which turns your WiFi equipped phone into a wireless access point for your laptop.

My mistake was reading another posting on All About Symbian, this one about Scouting for Symbian-powered bargains, and the Samsung i8910 HD caught my eye.

The i8910 is pretty close to the top of the range Symbian wise at the moment despite being a Samsung rather than a Nokia: big 360 x 640 pixels 3.7" OLED capacitative touch screen, nice camera which does HD video, sexy third party firmware to sort out some of the niggles and it's available ridiculously cheap because (I suspect) it's not an Android phone or an iPhone. I picked mine up off eBay for about £170. Even after paying another £20 to get it unlocked and £8 for a case that was under £200 for what was effectively an unused phone.

But I really didn't get on with it. I hinted as much in my first posting about it and it's not got much better. So on Friday I say down and reviewed the i8910 alongside the Nokia 6760.

One my biggest problems has been with data entry. I did finally get the latest firmware and DayHand installed which helped with data entry a bit but I was still struggling with accuracy and was finding typing very slow.

In contrast the 6760 has a slide out keyboard with real keys, and predictive text that works so I was getting fast and accurate data entry.

In addition although the 6760 screen is a lot smaller I'm not wasting most of it with keyboard so the text area visible during data entry was effectively greater.

By the way talking of size in reality, despite the stock photos on the right, the 6760 is smaller than the i8910 - they are both about the same width with the 6760 keyboard away.

The problems with the user interface didn't stop with data entry. With the i8910 web browsing sucked, whether I used the native browser or Opera Mobile. I kept tapping (i.e. clicking) on the wrong link as my fingers were too clumsy to pick out the right link unless I zoomed the screen to the point where all the extra screen real estate was wasted.

With the 6760 I just move the cursor pointer around until I'm sure I'm on the link (which is highlighted) before clicking it. That works.

The i8910's battery life seemed to be about a day and a half, even after conditioning it, so it reality you had to charge it nightly. The 6760 will last three to four days on one charge if you're only using it as a phone.

On the plus side the i8910's OLED screen is quite lovely with vivid colours and yes, it will play video (although I suspect it'll chew up the battery ... and why do I want to play video on my phone anyway?). But if you're the sort of person who likes carrying a photo album around on their phone the i8910 would be just the job.

One of the big differences is that the i8910 does have WiFi, which the 6760 doesn't, but as I'm still on a free data deal from giffgaff that doesn't really bother me much right now (and I can tether my laptop or Nokia N800 via Bluetooth if I need to). I admit that the camera was pretty good, a lot better than the 6760 which only really worked adequately on well lit days, but I've got a good little camera in my TZ-7 which I carry a lot.

Anyway cutting to the chase I've gone back to the 6760. It's lighter, I get on with the keyboard, and I don't have to worry about battery life.

But I'm still unclear why I didn't get on with a touch screen phone when so many people seem to. Is it me just being clumsy? Is it that the Symbian model for data entry, in all its formats, is poor compared to iPhone or Android? I really don't know. I must borrow some of my friends' phones and try but I suspect my next phone may be an Android phone with a slide out keyboard.

Not just yet though.