My Blog

This is my personal Blog. If you want to read the Fripp Design blog please visit www.frippdesign.co.uk/blog

April 29th 2009 Touch VS QWERTY keyboard

Being a busy impatient designer I love the fluidity of a touch screen but having large hands and trying to write anything on a touch screen can be very tedious.

Owning an IPod touch I do really appreciate the speed and style of the touch screen interface but at the same time I want the direct response and speed from a QWERTY keyboard.

The latest product that combines the two beautifully is the Palm Pre (http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/).

Hailed as the closet phone with the potential to be an apple iPhone killer, combining a high res touch screen and a full QWERTY keyboard I believe it will deliver.

Let’s hope Palm can give apples iPhone a run for its money (but I do like Apple though!).

May 6th 2009 More touch screen rant

I know there appears to be a theme here, but it is a pet subject of mine at the moment. As a designer, I like to see innovative stuff, we're doing some great product design at Fripp...but, in some way I'm glad we're not designing mobile phones!

Why? With the advent of excellent touch screen technologies, most of the functionality of a mobile phone is now being designed in software and driven by soft buttons...the days of the flip open phone or the phones with retractable keyboards is fast disappearing. All we're now left with are sterile looking boxes which are getting harder and harder to distinguish from one manufacturer to another.

Could be, in a generation of phone development, consumers will get bored with what the manufacturers are currently offering and will look for designs which are distinct from one another. From my perspective I can't wait for that to happen...in the mean time I just hope the phone doesn't ring and we get asked to design an iPhone look alike...I know what my answer will be!!!