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Comment by novum | Hacker News Reader

I had my hands on one for about a minute from a friend who's a Google employee. The screen was gorgeous and looked to be a little larger than the iPhone's. There's a row of 4 touch buttons at the base of the screen and the phone vibrates briefly when you push them.

I was completely baffled as to the purpose of the trackball. It could click, point, and roll-to-scroll, but you can do all those things via gestures on the screen.

It has a cute white icon on the back; a little android waving a semacode flag.

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Re: the touch buttons -- their design is a serious mistake that makes me question the vision behind the entire operation. Why? Look at the purpose of each of the buttons:

* The Back Button (leftmost) -- the operation of this button is context sensitive (Am I going back a web page, back to the previous app? It depends on how I got to where I am now.) and it is so unfortunately right beside the backspace button in the landscape keyboard. This wouldn't be a problem for a physical button, but since it's touch-sensitive it's very easy to brush by back and lose all the form data you just entered on the webpage.

* The Menu Button (center-left): Hidden functionality is a bad idea. One of the nice things about the iPhone is that it's very rare the application has a capability that you cannot discover by looking at the contents of the screen. Android, on the other hand, routinely hides functionality in a menu. Worse, the type of functionality hidden is different in every application. You will never be able to guess where the "Accounts" menu button is going to be without looking at it.

* The Home Button (center-right): I have no problem with this button aside from its touch sensitivity.

* The Search Button (rightmost): On iPhones, we know this button as "hit the home button twice."

Re: the trackball -- it's because they don't have long-click precise targeting for the cursor on Android phones like they do on the iPhone.

I agree the Android buttons are a bit of a problem. I dislike how every handset maker seems to implement them differently. HTC is a funny example because they use at least 4 different button layouts/orders. More than a dozen if you count clickable buttons versus touch buttons. That's a bit much. I'm not looking forward to upgrading to a device with a different layout in the future. I don't really care which layout is the best I just want some consistency.

The other issue which you eluded to is Back versus Menu -> Quit. I'm always a bit paranoid that Back isn't really closing an application and my battery will be dead so I often re-launch the app and look for a Menu -> Quit option. I have a little mental spreadsheet of which apps I can use Back on and which ones I need to Menu -> Quit on. Android really needs a more sensible way of handling multi-tasking.

their design is a serious mistake that makes me question the vision behind the entire operation

IMHO, you're in the weeds about the vision of this device, the true disruptive potential doesn't have to do with out-designing Apple.

I also got to see a few of these throughout the weekend...there are ~15,000+ and they are unlocked. If Google goes to market (direct-to-consumer), priced above true cost & free from contract - instead of the absolute BS games that wireless providers have been stringing out - that is seriously disrupting the market.

To be honest, buttons are the last thing I would be worried about if Google turns the market on it's head. That said, they might, they might not, but the possibility has me curious until the actual release.

There is a reason why all the carriers in the US subsidize phones with long contracts. The reason is that Americans like to spread out their purchases. Offering the opportunity to not do so isn't going to have a major impact because too few people want to buy their phone outright for it to matter.

In any case, the vision I'm questioning is the design vision. If the sales method were the only novel thing about this device, Google could as easily have paid another company to release their newest phone through Google's portal instead of directly through the network.

'I was completely baffled as to the purpose of the trackball. It could click, point, and roll-to-scroll, but you can do all those things via gestures on the screen.'

This helps you read web pages while you scroll them.

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