Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
I will never understand why people demand physical page turn buttons on their ereaders, but I have never heard anyone complain about the lack of physical dialing buttons on their smartphone.
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Let me see if I can help you understand, 'cuz it's pretty darn obvious to me.
Keypad entry on a touch screen sucks. It's error-prone and imprecise, and requires you to look at the pad. You don't see business-quality office phones, or calculators for that matter, all going to touch screens, do you?
Many people do still have dumbphones for the keypad, and some folks seek out the few smartphones with real tactile keyboards. And I've heard plenty of people...senior citizens mostly...complain about the lack of buttons on a smartphone.
But you only dial numbers on a smart phone a tiny percentage of the time, like oh, say, 10 digits at the beginning of call, and that's when you're not using speed dial or a contact entry. Maybe a few digits now and then to navigate through a touch tone menu. The touch screen is so useful for OTHER stuff, that most of us are willing to accept the trade off for the small percentage of time we need to dial.
Page turning is the single most used operation on a reader.
It's done repetitively and constantly. I (and many others) find the ergonomics of touch-screen page turning to be horrendous. It requires constant stretching of the fingers, and often constant changing of the grip on the reader, depending on how it's most comfortable to hold it, plus you are putting your finger in the way of the screen, and touching it, which for many people is horribly distracting and requires excessive screen cleaning.
("But I never see fingerprints on my screen!" Well good for you. Accept that not everyone is the same and get over yourself. No one is telling YOU you must have a reader with page buttons.)
If I wanted that kind of inconvenient ergonomics, I'd just continue reading paperbacks. With good side-positioned page turn buttons, I can get a comfortable grip in almost any desired situation, and turn pages with just a slight increase of pressure. It's one of the things that made me love my K3.
ApK