Nokia, no, no, no, what are you doing?! Having seen more pictures of its latest smartphone, the Nokia N97, I can say that the company’s usability department needs to be shot! The N97 features a physical QWERTY keyboard (above), which ordinarily would be perfect for text entry.

Perfect, that is, if the rest of the keys are where you expect them to be – you know, like the spacebar and the shift keys!

But no, Nokia in its infinite wisdom has chosen to place the space bar to the side of the QWERTY characters, next to the M key, while there’s only one shift key, at the far left.

Anyone who’s ever done any typing will know you simply have to have two shift keys, while moving the space bar is just sacrilege. I can understand doing this if you don’t expect the user to enter much text, but if that’s case, why include a physical QWERTY keyboard at all, when there’s a perfectly good virtual keyboard that can be used via the N97’s touchscreen?

More ranting after the jump…

I’ve used a keyboard like the N97’s before. The Toshiba G910 uses one, and I can honestly say it’s the most frustrating experience I’ve ever had! Small smartphone keyboards are already difficult enough to use due to their small size, but with only one shift key, you’re forever having to do finger-origami.

Just try typing a capital A or the @ symbol, for example. A finger on your left hand holds down the shift key, while another finger on your right then has to press the A, which is just above the shift key.

This is bad enough in terms of key proximity, but then consider you’ll actually be holding the N97 in your hands while doing this. In other words, you’re trying to push down two buttons on the same side of the while holding it in the air – if you can do this without dropping it, you have the fingers of a 12 year old!!

In short, at a stroke, Nokia have killed the productivity of the N97, rendering it as easy to use for text as an iPhone (i.e. ok, but not great).

Please, Nokia, reconsider before you release this beauty! If you won’t move the space key back to its original location, at the very least give the N97 two proper shift keys. Otherwise, your entire keyboard is simply useless!

[Source: TheNokiaBlog]