But adapt to what: some of us remember Steve Jobs on stage showing the leading smart phones. He said he would make one that's smarter than all of them. And easier to use than all of them.
Then he put the leading blackberries up. He said that half of it was plastic buttons. But plastic buttons don't adapt to the context: they have something printed on them. So how do you solve this?
Then he said, it turns out we did solve this, in software: with soft buttons. Button text changes dynamically.
So, he would make one giant screen. Then he said, well, how do you interact with it?
Then he derided styluses as something you lose.
Then he showed off multitouch.
And that was the start of the fal of BlackBerry.
People reduce the value of ideas to 0. But look at this luminary: the single idea, that we want something smarter than any phone (as powerful as a computer ,which is what they shrank down) and easier to use than any phone.
Then, if you want something easier to use you can't have plastic keys with stuff printed on them.
Then, a giant screen.
Then, finger interaction.
So much complexity drilled down in such a high-level way. That is what separate(s/d) a $400B company from yours. Or from BlackBerry, which failed to adapt.
I'd still buy the crap out of a Desire-Z form factor with modern hardware (say Nexus 4 or better).
The touch screen is superior for lots of uses but when it comes to entering none-english text (code, operating a shell) it falls flat on it's face.
Of course if we are talking about fantasy tech I want the Psion 5MX form factor with a 1920x1200 screen and capable of running something like Raspbian ;).
When it comes to entering non-english text, touchscreens are fantastic for millions upon millions if not possibly billions of people for reasons other than "operating a shell".
I didn't have to sell my parents on buying new iPhones, finally, when they saw me switch from typing rapid English with a friend complete with a random emoji, to Korean while chatting with a cousin halfway across the world (for free, I might add, BB really missed an opportunity there), to Chinese handwriting recognition while still talking to said cousin, and finally Voiceover (the screenreader) just to demo to my visually impaired dad. Then setting up Facetime on the big(ger than previous generation iPhones) iPhone 5 display sealed the deal, so to speak.
Touchscreens are fantastic for the average consumer, and they can be great for techies too. They might fall flat compared to physical keyboards but we're not the target audience ...and even if I'm not, I do so much more than entering code or shell commands every day that I'm willing to make that trade in a heartbeat. Just the flexibility of software keyboards switching languages being an everyday thing nowadays kind of blows my mind still, having come from the world of Graffiti and hardware keyboards for years before iPhone.
> When it comes to entering non-english text, touchscreens are fantastic for millions upon millions if not possibly billions of people for reasons other than "operating a shell".
And for — as you demonstrate — not just entering non-english text but seamlessly switching between languages even within a single convo.
There are times when been able to login to a server via my mobile is really useful (generally to give a misbehaving process a good swift kicking) and any keyboard that would make a shell easier to operate would also make typing text messages, emails etc easier.
Your use case exists, but satisfying your (edge) use case doesn't create a $400B company. What Jobs&Co. did was to understand what would make the average user's experience better on a smartphone.
Android initially did not use touch. You can, in principle, build a non-touch Android phone even now, though some apps won't work well.
Android did a very good job of adding touch, but that just shows that if you have a well-architected UI stack without a lot of legacy apps that would have funky behaviors, adding touch is very do-able.
Had the Android team done a less-thorough job adding touch, history might be very different. Microsoft is painted into a corner, with desktop apps adapting poorly to touch, and developers adapting poorly to "Modern" apps.
I'd argue that it wasn't because of doing a "good job" adding touch that allowed them to succeed. It was the price of free.
Even now all "touch" events are treated as 'click' events. And it's not easy to get access to the number of fingers on a view or to track them like iOS can.
While the obvious analysis is that they were making a Blackberry competitor, wasn't Android really targeting deployment on hardware that could Windows Mobile? iirc, the first phones running Android were slight variants of Windows Mobile hardware, which happened to have the BB form factor.
And if this was the case, there were plenty of touch screen Windows Phones at the time. I think Android going touch would have been inevitable.
Having said that, if Apple didn't release the iPhone, the definition of touch on Google would probably have meant "with a stylus".
Then he put the leading blackberries up. He said that half of it was plastic buttons. But plastic buttons don't adapt to the context: they have something printed on them. So how do you solve this?
Then he said, it turns out we did solve this, in software: with soft buttons. Button text changes dynamically.
So, he would make one giant screen. Then he said, well, how do you interact with it?
Then he derided styluses as something you lose.
Then he showed off multitouch.
And that was the start of the fal of BlackBerry.
People reduce the value of ideas to 0. But look at this luminary: the single idea, that we want something smarter than any phone (as powerful as a computer ,which is what they shrank down) and easier to use than any phone.
Then, if you want something easier to use you can't have plastic keys with stuff printed on them.
Then, a giant screen.
Then, finger interaction.
So much complexity drilled down in such a high-level way. That is what separate(s/d) a $400B company from yours. Or from BlackBerry, which failed to adapt.
Pure idea.