My first post on the road, from the keyboard of the Compal MID device. I’m currently at the top of Carlton Calton Hill in Edinburgh, a site that holds a lot of Scottish history; from the cairn to remind us of the recent fight for a Scottish Parliament, to the old Royal Observatory and the old prison.
It’s also the site for Beltane Fire Festival and the Torchlight Procession. If you think of fire in Edinburgh, then this is one of the locations to come to.
The Compal was used today in two areas. The first was navigation on a bicycle. even though I have no mounting bracket on the handlebars, the Compal sat happily in my inside pocket, within easy reach for me to stop and check directions on Google Maps. I did have to use the HTML only web version though to get an acceptable speed, but it got me here – although not on the route I would have went – it seemed to delight in taking me up the steepest hills.
I could also have used it to pull in information, primarily from Wikipedia, about the buildings, monuments and history of the hill – and while that’s like asking an American to look up the Oath of Office so they don’t get it wrong (ahem), if I was somewhere else (say a Florida Theme Park or The Alamo) having an independent tour guide online, on a large and easy to read screen would probably be just as good as a guide book; if not better as I could explore information and links myself.
Doesn’t the device do spellchecking ? ;-) Calton Hill is what you may have meant to type above. Although Catlon is probably how our esteemed cooncil’s cheap brochures may spell it….
I’m just about to come to that, and the blogging capabilities of the device, watch for my next post.
How do you like the keyboard?
Typing this over my Aigo with XP and 3G.
The keyboard is comparable to other devices with a ‘flat’ style of keyboard. It does embedd the numbers and requries you to use the FN key to get to them. Adding a fifth row would make it very cramped, but I wonder if that would help the usability. I also wonder why an internet device insists on putting the @ under a function key instead of the less used : character.
A GOOD QWERTY keyboards MUST have 5rows, this can be done very effeciently in fact, keys need to be not “wall-to-wall” as on the Aigo or E90 Nokia but with space between them as on the OQO, G1 phone, Treos and Blackberries, and last but not least :) the Sidekicks. But also they need to be 5 row, there’s really no way around it the only two great and decent 5 row qwerty keyboards I know of so far is the Sidekick and G1.
The OQO 02 and 2+ while having GREAT keys have a not so great layout. I personally like the separate “101/102 keyboard wannabe` numeric pad layout but don’t see it as a justification to leave out the 5th row OR to throw around the keys like theyv’ve done.