Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing

So, the Samsung UpStage that I have through the Sprint Ambassador program is an interesting beast. It's got a tiny screen on one side where you have a normal phone keypad.  On the other side, it has a large screen but only an 8-way navigation pad with no numeric keypad (8-way => up, down, left, right, left soft key, right soft key, select, and back although it also has an "end" key).

On the large screen side, we'll call this the media side, all but the select key are touch sensitive buttons.  Besides the direct (and virtual) push of the four corner buttons and four directional buttons, the pad supports scroll gestures for for the directions.  You can scroll one line or item, or by two lines or items.  Additionally, you can cause it to start auto scrolling in the direction you've swiped.  All of this is given in the tutorial that launches the first time you run the phone. 

Although this functionality works OK, it has a couple of serious flaws.  Frequently, the phone misses the first part of a scroll-down gesture and instead just triggers the key press for the key at the end of the swipe.  This is inevitably the "end" key.  Sometimes the applications asks if I'd really like to exit, saving me a huge amount of pain.  Other times, I'm just left with the idle screen again.  The same thing happens with the back key, too, but that's less of an issue.  Overall, it means I have been trying not to use the gestures, even though they make scrolling much faster.  Even so, when pressing the down arrow, being off by a little bit to either side can cause the same problem.  To be fair, I haven't adjusted the sensitivity settings any to see if that can help.  I'm not certain which way it's off by, if either.

As you may have guessed, you can't use the media side to have phone calls.  Using the contacts or call history, though, you can trigger a call.  The phone will then tell you to flip promptly.  If you're phone is asleep and you need to make a phone call, you have to hit a button to wake it up and then hit the flip button to give control to the small screen side, which I call the phone side, so that you can then start to dial.  This isn't particularly good for emergencies.  You can't just pick up the phone and start to dial.  The media side doesn't have a speaker or microphone, either, but that's fine since it saves that screen from face juice in favor of hand juice while holding the phone to your ear.

For entering text in to applications or sending text messages, you can either flip the phone over by using the left or right soft key when prompted by the application or you can choose to use a scroll type selector to choose letters and numbers one at a time.  You can't use the physical flip key, though, as that sort of flip exits all applications.  That's good for flipping to make a call and yes, it does prompt you that you will close all applications.  There are even a couple of cases where you can only use the media side entry, such as when entering a Bluetooth PIN code for pairing.  On the other side, sometimes It'll say "flip," but most of the time it says "save" which I haven't quite figured out the meaning of since all it does is flip back.   Why is this all so inconsistent?  Why ask me? Ask Sprint or Samsung. (I asked Sprint via the feedback.)  Sending messages can happen entirely on the phone side and can also be triggered from the media side. 

I had expected the hassle of flipping back and forth to be a real problem.  As it turns out, it's surprisingly natural and easy, even if the UI is inconsistent. That said, if you've got a game that relies on the numeric keypad for game play elements or an application that uses the numbers for important shortcuts, you'll be out of luck.  The keypads on the opposite side of the active flip side are completely disabled.

Another annoyance I have is that all of the menus throughout the phone still list shortcut keys next to them. Every time I see a menu I am reminded that I have to scroll down to the nth item instead of just pressing the n-key.  This causes a certain level of frustration that could have been solved be requiring, at least for built-in applications, that the number short-cut keys were removed.  If they were, I'd soon forget how much faster certain navigation elements would be. It's minor, but surprisingly frustrated especially when scrolling down and accidentally hitting the end or back key and having to start all over again.

Do the benefits of this design outweigh the issues with the input?  In my opinion, they might after some use.  The phone is definitely very small when not in it's battery wallet.  The screen is much bigger than if a full keypad were to have been on the media side.  A slide-out keypad would have increased the thickness as well as adding cost and complexity.  Overall, the usability has surprised me in a good way, even with the annoyances and frustrations. I just don't do the same things on it that I do on my LG VX9800 handset that has a full keyboard but that is almost exactly the same size as the UpStage in it's battery wallet.  Put another way, the UpStage is basically the same size as just the top part of the VX9800 (the part without the keyboard and battery).

One final comment... why didn't Samsung give this device the Bluetooth HID profile for keyboard input?!

Posted by Shane on April 26, 2007 8:42 AM | Permalink