Video: @janole and Gravity's pretty awesome Portrait keyboard.

I’m sure a lot of us here have heard, at least at some point, about the awesome social networking client gravity. The new client being developed for S^3 devices primarily, seems to be taking a departure from the default text input options available for S^3.  A key bit of work being undertaken by @janole (creator of gravity and one-man-dev army 🙂 ) is to

1. Do away with the separate text box

2. Provide a decent QWERTY keyboard

3. Provide a transparent area where users can input text, see the messages being replied to and interact with the non-text input areas.

The following video is a demonstration of the keyboard in its current iteration and I must say, it’s quite the looker. My only issue here is the lack of consistency that users will likely find when going between apps on their phones.  Opera mobile for example provides its own, distinct input options while in the browser as opposed to utilising the  default option (for good reason mind you). And now gravity is about to do the same. When Nokia does finally implement an improved input method, what will users think and feel when forced to use a myriad of different options to input the same text. Then, what of the different styles looks and feels of applications which while they may provide great user experience lead to inconsistencies that may frustrate the end-user.

Personally, if I was in charge of Symbian development, I’d take a long hard look at what Jan Ole Suhr is doing and either buy the implementation from him, or work with him to improve the current input options. Because if I’m honest, his looks a sad sight better than the one’s we’ve seen leaked recently.

[flickr video=5107675399]

Video can be found here

via

Cheers on the gravity keyboard tips Adnan and Fahoum

Tags: Gravity

Category: Nokia, Video