Where Have All The Buttons Gone?

Since the arrival of the original iPhone there's been a major move towards touch interaction with smartphones at the expense of almost everything else.

I'm currently using a T-Mobile Vario 2 - a pretty old piece of kit which pre-dates the announcement of the first iPhone. It's covered in buttons, up front there is a five way d-pad controller, two softkey buttons, two application buttons, start and end call keys; and a Windows Start button and OK/Back button. On the right hand side are power, wireless and camera buttons; on the left another Ok/Back button, a voice dial button with separate functions for push and hold; and a jog dial with push to select.

That's six programmable buttons to launch my preferred applications. The d-pad is used to control any of a selection of media players as well as to move through the interface. In fact before the arrival of the iPhone Microsoft were trying to move its touchscreen and non-touchscreen interfaces closer together with the result that the Vario 2 can be navigated without ever having to touch the screen.

Returning to the Vario 2 after eighteen months of touch-only interaction I have to say that I think Microsoft were heading in the right direction before the world went iPhone-crazy. It is so much quicker and easier to interact with the Vario 2 using its buttons (and not forgetting an excellent full qwerty slide out keyboard) that I could be easily persuaded to make it my daily driver once more, despite its shortage of memory and low resolution QVGA screen.

Now if only someone would build a new model with a VGA screen and 256MB of RAM, I'd be onto that like a shot...