The Brick - Size matters

I don't mind that the Nokia E90 Communicator is bigger than I had imagined. Actually, I kinda like big and heavy cell phones because they give me the assurance that quality materials were used to build it. Furthermore, it's the norm that bigger phones will have better battery life and more features than those miniature razor thin phones. I'm not calling it The Brick for nothing.


But one problem with The Brick is that the internal keyboard is a little too big. To help with the visualization, let's say that two full qwerty keyboards from RIM (Blackberry) or Palm (Treos) would fit in that space side by side. This size requires a lot of travel for your thumbs if you're thumb typing and your hands have to move a lot to permit this travel, making it uncomfortable to type long emails on it. On the other hand, the keyboard is not big enough to allow typing with your fingers, like you would do on a laptop.

And, to make things more complicated, the internal keys are extremely hard so they require some strength to completely push them down; and they don't have much travel making it hard to determine whether you pushed them or not. This made me use key tones (those annoying beeps every time you press a key) on a cell phone for the first time in my life.

I will eventually get used to this keyboard but this is one bad out of the box impression of The Brick.