According to a slashdot article, a french company released the Jackito, which, I quote:

“…new kind of PDA has no stylus, doesn’t offer handwriting recognition and has no keyboard. Instead, it is based on touchscreen technology and relies entirely on your thumbs for input”

Honestly, do you guys think this can penetrate the market enough?

I don’t know if touch screen technology is “rugged” enough, but it seems to me that this TDA isn’t worth it.

No handwriting recognition would mean it should at least have some rudimentary T9 style predictive input for it to function effectively as a digital assistant. I never even considered those small QWERTY keyboards built in PDAs (wether soft or hard) or select cell phone models as “input-friendly.” Let’s hope the french never considered using such a layout for their soft-kb.

Which brings me to my opinion on the matter: If you’re going the finger-pressing route anyways, why not just stick to the old, durable keypad-type input method? I think the TDA attempting to incorporate the same style input as your regular cell-phones et all without the physical buttons is just a cosmetic issue. After all, you get to use more screen space when needed.

But I do not deny that there’s nothing wrong with replacing even the regular keypad input with touch-screens, I just think that your machine wouldn’t last long, considering not all people have “sensitive hands.”

The stylus for me is just like the mouse in desktop computing. There must be so many alternatives to input/user-interface, but the mouse simply does the job effectively. In a PDA environment, the stylus is the way to go for me (try writing freehand with a mouse). You get to use the stylus like a regular pen for writing; you get more precise tapping (say like having to tap on those smaller “buttons”)

What do you guys think?

post updated on September 7, 2005 @ 05:40PM