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I personally find touchscreens useful. I grew up on the REB1100 (what, 10 years ahead of its time?). Touchscreen, wing buttons, great design. Not the greatest firmware, largely because of the usual corporate, sociopathic bent for world domination, but okay. Had bookmarks, dictionaries, highlighting and notes. Bookmarking with a touchscreen is great for proofreading a book that you're editing.
PB360 was based on its design, added the awesome cover, lost the ability to prop itself up in landscape mode. At least it stole its design from something that worked.
The designers for these companies are being told to mimic these designs. Or they're phoning it in. These are ugly in any rotation but their basic portrait presentation. That giant bezel at the bottom with the archaic Sony d-pad -- that is lazy design, probably where the battery is. Or everything was sacrificed for "thinness" -- which is equally stupid. Having something you can actually wrap your fingers around is not a problem, it's a benefit.
As you say, no thought is being spent on how to actually use the things. Right-hand-centric, with an easily-hit second set of buttons under the ball of your thumb. Imagine the awkwardness of holding one of these things in your left hand, in portrait mode while trying to push the d-pad to change the page? Or landscape mode? No better.
Who would hold a book (or anything) by its corner? The alternate use-cases of one-handed manipulation seem to be ignored again and again -- I can imagine a manager spending two minutes with the product, holding it in his hands and playing with the buttons and calling it good, but never actually using the thing in real life. Worse, it was all done to Marketing's requirements: "sexy" "sleek" "futuristic"
The REB1100 was even designed to be held primarily in your left hand! (At least if you go by the screen printing -- it was functionally hand-agnostic.) That's how a right-handed user would use it, while drinking coffee, etc. Button right under the thumb, genius. I could even push the back wing-button with the ball of my thumb.
These ridiculous designs are being made as movie-props -- the movies in their heads of how a "sexy" spokes-model should use it in the commercial or something.
With Apple products, how the thing works marries pretty well with how the thing looks and handles. That's why there are fanbois. There is something to love there. The PB360 has some of that magic. The rest of these things are utterly undistinctive.
Boring. I hope the rumors of the Jetbook-Mini are true.
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