Glofiish have been showing off their new Glofiish M700 smartphone. The M700 uses Windows Mobile 6, and comes with a wide range of features, including Wi-Fi, 2 megapixel camera, slide-out full QWERTY keyboard and GPS.

This is a great looking smartphone, packed with features, and with a keyboard that seems to be actually useful. However, compare the M700 with a Nokia N95, and suddenly what seems smart isn't quite smart enough.

The Nokia N95 (below) is a smartphone in that it comes with more smart features than you can invent acronyms for. HSDPA, quad-band GSM, GPS Sat-Nav, 5 megapixel camera, DVD quality video recording - you name it, the N95's got it.

Except for one thing...a keyboard! Despite having an innovative dual slide function that makes it easy to access multimedia-specific functions, such as music or video playback, the N95 has no easy way of entering text. This makes using any application reliant on text next to useless. SMS is OK, as we're all used to using a numeric keypad for typing in our 160 characters, but try entering a web address into its browser - it ain't pretty!

This means that the N95 has all the features of a smartphone, without actually being able to be used as a smartphone. It's smart alright, but you'd never use it to replace any of your laptop's functions.
In contrast, the Glofiish M700 most definitely is a smartphone. Having a full QWERTY keyboard may make the phone bigger and more clunky, but it also makes it more usable for entering text. In other words, you can actually use it as a smartphone.

However, in every other respect, the N95 knocks the M700 for six. The N95 comes with super-fast 3.6Mbps HSDPA, against the M700's measly EGPRS, which downloads data at not even a tenth the speed of the N95. Both come with Wi-Fi, but where the M700 has a 2 megapixel camera, the N95 comes with a 5 megapixel monster with auto-focus and Carl Zeiss lens. Even the GPS Sat-Nav features of the N95 are better.

So what you're left with is a smartphone with relatively weak features but a great keyboard, and a mobile phone with fantastic features that can't really be used as a smartphone because of its lack of keyboard.

Shouldn't somebody by now have worked out a way of combining the two: you know, squeezing the N95's features into a dedicated smartphone that comes with a real live keyboard (and that doesn't look like a Nokia Communicator!)
It all comes down to the interface, of course. The reason the N95 can be so unwieldy is because there's no keyboard, but as Apple have shown so effectively with the iPhone, phones with keyboards look ridiculous and really are clunky. That said, glorious though the iPhone's interface certainly is, it's still going to have the same problem as the N95 and its cousins with regards to text entry.

Can't somebody come up with something to make text entry on a mobile both easy and elegant?

Until they do, we're stuck between choosing the clunky-but-usable approach, as typified by the M700, or the elegant-but-useless approach as typified by the N95. For now, I'm erring towards the clunky approach, as I need a phone that'll handle text more than I need a 5 megapixel camera on my phone.

But I do actually want a 5 megapixel camera on my phone! Curse these decisions!

[Source: Aving.Net]