Here's a look at the Samsung Transform (SPH-M920) in physical input mode. The phone, which I upgraded to last week, is an Android 2.1 (so far) device carried by Sprint since October 2010. The original image was lifted from Phandroid's Android Forums (er... thanks!), but I've adjusted it to enhance the visibility of the orange labels. (They're still somewhat indistinct, I know — my apologies.)
Overall, I lucked out with this phone in terms of keyboard. The Transform has one of the nicest keyboards Samsung's ever produced... and in a time when they've been experimenting with a lot of WEIRD designs (see below). I was dreading the thought of getting a phone with a keyboard I'd have to "learn to live with", but instead the Transform has made me even more spoiled & snobbish than I already was.
Still, there are the inevitable few annoyances, made all the more glaring by the otherwise excellent nature of the keyboard. And one or two choices about its layout are simply braindead, and make you wonder what line of reasoning could possibly have led Samsung to them.
First off, let's leap right to the single most infuriating thing about the Transform: Why, in the name of all that is good and right in the universe, is comma not bound on the period key (Fn-period)??? If you can't make the label out, comma is Fn-N. Fn-period is wasted on an insipid and questionably-useful ".com" shortcut binding. I'm guessing an association on "dot" explains the location, but it sucks. If Samsung was hell-bent on a ".com" key, they should at least have gone conceptual ("Internet") and bound it to Fn-@.
For that matter, why do the @ key and the ? have no alternate mappings at all? (Well, they do, but Fn-@ is just @, and Fn-? is still ?) What, they completely ran out of symbols that seemed useful to include? The lack of Fn-@ is particularly infuriating, as it's the obvious location for ".com" and that symbol's actual placement is so shitty. But I'm sure they could have come up with something useful for Fn-?, too. For one thing, there's no tilde to be found anywhere.
There are also visual frustrations. Why can't someone come up with alt-symbol labeling that lets you clearly differentiate, even at a quick glance, between comma (Fn-N) and apostrophe (Fn-K)? Or between hyphen (Fn-X) and underscore (Fn-V), for that matter? Both of those pairs are easily confused, when scanning for a character while typing. Even now that I'm more familiar with the layout, I still sometimes screw it up.
I have a feeling the distinctions would be far clearer, although it would mean breaking their label rules, if Samsung had placed the comma and underscore labels low on the key – to the right of the main label, instead of above-right. Since they're orange, I think it would still be clear what that means. And lower placement for those baseline symbols would avoid them appearing "up in the air", where they look confusingly like their higher-placement counterparts.
An Aside: Samsung's "Creative" Keyboard Layouts
How weird have some of Sammy's recent keyboards been? Think "space bar in the middle of the ZXCV__BNM row"-level weird! (That's the Intercept, my phone's immediate predecessor.) There are other weirdnesses, and other models with different craziness. A lot of shit you just can't imagine anyone wanting.
It's reminiscent of Nokia in the early 2000's, when they inexplicably decided to reinvent the dial pad. Suddenly they were producing phones with circular button layouts (that's right, pushbuttons arranged like a rotary phone) and similar types of insanity. That went "well" for them, as I'm sure you can imagine, so Samsung apparently chose to emulate it. :-/ The excellent, very conservative keyboard on the Transform may be a sign that Samsung's fiddling was received about as well as Nokia's.
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