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Form now on, here at Nokia Connects, Sunday is not a day of rest, it’s a day of fierce debate. We’d like to share with you some topics each week that will get you talking, agreeing, disagreeing, arguing and questioning. Some of these topics could be quite light and some of them may touch on more ‘prickly’ subjects.

As this is the first one though, we’ll start off nice and slow.

Nokia Phone

via techcodex

To qwerty or not to qwerty?

When we look at form factor in today’s mobile phones it’s clear that two or three form-factors are ruling the roost. There’s the all touch-screen (e.g Lumia 900), the qwerty keyboard candybar (e.g E6) and the slide out qwerty keyboard (e.g E7). Obviously there are more and more variations of them left, right and center but these are the foundations of what we’re looking at.

There are advantages and disadvantages to having a hardware keyboard. The main advantage is that you can type faster and in more comfort, allowing you to type out long emails or even blog posts. The disadvantages however, are you’ll usually have a smaller screen unless you’re rocking a slider phone, in which case the sliding mechanism has to be deployed in order to enjoy they keyboard, meaning if you just need to quickly type something short, you might have a slight faff on your hands. Also, the mechanism takes up space in the hardware and adds size and weight, naturally.

With this in mind, I thought about how many people are expressing their lust for the Lumia 800, which of course has no hardware keyboard. So I decided to search for something, what I searched for were people talking about qwerty keyboards in mobile. I’ll share just a couple of my findings with you now, but believe me when I say that the majority of my brief search were mostly in this camp:

 

Personally I really enjoy using a hardware keyboard, especially if it’s a good one like the E7. But, like you’ll notice on my short profile, I actually use an N9 and to tell you the truth, the on-screen keyboard works just great in portrait mode for my needs. If I need to write something longer or faster I will change to landscape in a second and go from there.

Is this purely a matter of personal preference? Maybe I have small nimble fingers and am able to just ‘get’ how to operate the screen naturally. Or maybe it was just practice? I find it usually takes a few days to become fluent on a new phone’s touch surface, is this the same for everyone or will some people need longer to adjust?

Whatever the reason, we’d like to know your thoughts on the subject. Tell me what you prefer and why you prefer it, how long it takes you to adjust and if you know of anyone who struggles with either an on-screen or hardware keyboard. Let the debate begin in the comments section or on Twitter! #NokiaDebate

+1 on-screen 🙂