And a word of general advice... Unless you're extremely skilled in the art of eating ice-cream out off a tiny inverted cone, don't. Get a bowl, seriously. While interesting, it was not altogether pleasurable to eat my cookies & cream out of a napkin today at Island Creamery.
I've been looking to get a new MP3 player for a while now. 1GB just doesn't cut it anymore. I've been looking out for those with a similar structure to my Samsung YP-U1. It's old, but I like it. Naturally, I spent hours looking for information and reviews of anything that interested me, and there was just this one little thing that ticked me off.
Touchpads.
Why on earth did anyone even invent those infernal contraptions, anyway? Sure, they look all cool and futuristic, but they're killers for anyone with big fingers. I happen to take pride in having slender digits(for a guy, anyway...), but I still hate the entire concept of touchscreens and pads.
Some of them work based on measuring the amount of infra-red radiation(or heat) that your fingers give off. Which basically means that after you've been trying to develop cryogenic abilities in the O' Level examination hall, the damn touchpad won't work until you steal some energy from your friends who have more cold-resistance charms.
Then there are the others that basically work on pressure. When you put your finger on the pad, it detects a tiny little amount of pressure and relays it to the gadget. So it's basically a traditional button made for people with the finger strength of a tapeworm. The thing is, that if your fingertip is any wider than 0.6 centimetres across, you'll be activating the touchpad right next to the one you were intending on poking.
The worst thing is, they don't always work properly. Put aside the 'gargantuan' finger problems, the damn touchpads are sometimes calibrated inproperly, or don't respond to your prods. Worse, the whole damn interface can sometimes be so sensitive that you end up pushing the pause button every time you sit down with the thing in your pocket. So they invented the 'hold' switch...
And there's also the issue of FINGERPRINTING. If CSI were asked to extract and identify fingerrpints from all the iPhones in the just Singapore alone, they'd kill themselves and let the next batch take over. Which would also kill themselves. Did the inventor of the touchscreen realise that people would be mashing their sweaty, oily fingers onto that once-so-shiny screen, smothering the digital interface so utterly that one could not fail to appreciate the refraction of light through finger-sweat?
I can see where they got their inspiration from. Anyone remember Minority Report? You know the one where Tom Cruise believes he is being set up because a crime-predicting pre-cognitive system says that he would be killing someone who he didn't know, when in fact this said person had seriously wronged Tom Cruise in the past and thus made Cruise want to kill him? But in the end the dude suicides and everything is fine? Yeah, that one. Anyway, while not the focus of the story, there were these rather interesting computer interfaces where Tom Cruise could physically drag images around and magnify them by waving his arms. While this may have looked really cool in the movie, it's one of the most retarded concepts of the modern world.
Look at it this way. We invented computers and the Internet so that stuff would become more convenient for us. We have the mouse and its buttons, and the keyboard to perform simple actions on Windows. We can send emails from the comfort of our home, rather than ride forty days and forty nights on a smelly animal to deliver a bill. We can call each other up on this nifty little device called the telephone. Not sure if you've heard of it yet, but yeah. It's a great thing. But then just recently, we have been creating computers that make use of motion sensors for us to navigate an operating system. You can see them at the Science Centre. If you're a gamer, you might already have one in your Wii. Okay, that sounded wrong. In case you've been living in Rapture, these motion sensing technologies involve you waving your arms over a beam generator to move the cursor around. You move your arms retardedly in a wide, sweeping motion to flip a page, and make yourself look spastic when you jerk your hand forward to select an icon. Repeatedly, because our current motion-sensing calibration technologies are horrendously inaccurate. Also, if you have particularly reflective or translucent hands for some reason, the whole thing becomes simply impossible. So really, would you rather move a mouse four inches and make a few clickies, or wave your arms around multiple times like an idiot to push the "back" button on your browser?
The main reason I hear for putting touchpads on MP3 players is "for style". People, whatever Dr. Steinman tells you, aesthetics are not a moral imperative. Functionality is.
Gadget designers have forgotten the wonders of good, traditional, tactile buttons. The kind that lets you know that you're actually pressing something without having you need to look at the display. The kind that lets you skip a track or adjust the volume through the fabric of your jeans. The kind that doesn't do any random bullshit when you get the occasional finger spasm while using it. The kind that doesn't force you to take it our of your pocket and go "Whee, look! I'm only touching it lightly and it's responding!", all the while making yourself look like you have some unhealthy sexual obsession with your iPod.
Maybe I've been corrupted so much over my years at Montfort, but the whole "moving your finger in a circular motion continuously" thing that iPods have looks extremely suggestive to me. Can I say rim------
In my honest, and humble(or not) opinion, we should just effing destroy touchscreens and replace them with good old springy buttons. I am not going to become an old geezer. I'm too geeky for that. However, it must be known that touchpads are not the keyboards of the future. Can you imagine typing an essay without any tactile feedback from your keyboard? Touch Technology is too impractical and inaccurate for efficient use. So yeah, bring back the buttons.
The only time we should ever leave buttons, is when we can bloody integrate those things into our brains and adjust The Beegees to blare at full volume using only neural control.
Which isn't going to happen too soon. So buttons, please.
-Joe