Drawing a Line in the Sandwich: Android Phone Makers Right to Keep Buttons

The death of dedicated physical buttons is killing Android phone usability.  First smartphone vendors came for our keyboards, relegating QWERTY handsets to the low-end of the market while so-called “superphones” make you hunt and peck at virtual buttons on their touchscreens. Then dedicated camera buttons started to become an endangered species. Now, with Android 4.0, Google wants to replace the dedicated back / home / menu buttons below the screen with persistent icons that sit below all your apps. Fortunately, vendors are finally drawing a line in the sandwich.

At CES and Mobile World Congress, all the new Ice Cream Sandwich phones we saw had the same row of dedicated navigation buttons below their screens you see on Gingerbread, rather than the virtual set that appears on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the only Android 4.0 phone designed by Google. An Android rep told us that the company favors virtual buttons because they change position as you rotate the phone from portrait to landscape mode. Yet, from the HTC One X and One S, each of which has back, home and recent apps buttons at the bottom, to LG’s Optimus L7 phone with its circular physical home button and the unnamed Fujitsu Tegra 3 phone with its hard-plastic buttons, everyone’s ignoring Google’s advice.

Building buttons into the UI is a waste of precious screen real estate.  On the Samsung Galaxy’s Nexus’s 1280 x 720 screen, the virtual button bar takes up a full 96 pixels or 7.5 percent of the available vertical space in portrait mode. That may not seem like much, but it could be the difference between seeing an extra photo on a web page or needing to scroll. When you combine that with a 54-pixel status bar that appears on every screen, you’re losing 11.7 percent of your screen, before you get to application-specific toolbars like the gigantic 98-pixel button row that appears at the bottom of your inbox in Gmail .

In landscape mode, the effects of this wasted real-estate are not quite as bad as the button strip cuts 85 pixels off the side of the screen while the status bar still trims 52 off the top. Still every pixel you lose hurts your usability by making you scroll.

“In theory, physical buttons are an attractive concept: they can save precious screen real estate,” Nielsen Norman Group Usability Expert Raluca Budiu told us. “You don’t need to bother with interface widgets for ‘Back’ and ‘Search’ on the screen, if you have dedicated physical buttons that do exactly that.”

Budiu said that, by removing physical buttons from Ice Cream Sandwich, Google is actually getting rid of a major usability faux pas, the ambiguous “menu” button that has so many different functions in earlier versions of Android. The problem, Budiu noted, is that buttons which look the same but have different purposes in different contexts can confuse the user. Fortunately, in Ice Cream Sandwich, the menu buttons are all built into the app itself, not into the three system-wide navigation buttons.

However, buttons like back and home which perform the same function in every app, work better with their own dedicated, physical spaces. By including discrete back, home and recent apps buttons, vendors are providing the same consistent experience you get with the button bar, but are providing a far superior usability experience that saves all-important pixels. If only, the HTCs and LGs of the world would take their new-found button-consciousness a step further and put physical keyboards and dedicated camera buttons on their high-end phones again.

Online Editorial Director Avram Piltch oversees the production and infrastructure of LAPTOP’s web site. With a reputation as the staff’s biggest geek, he has also helped develop a number of LAPTOP’s custom tests, including the LAPTOP Battery Test. Catch the Geek’s Geek column here every week or follow Avram on twitter.

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Fujitsu Tegra 3 Phone Hands-On: Fingerprint Reader, Physical Buttons

HTC and LG aren’t the only ones getting into the Tegra 3 smartphone game. Japanese electronics vendor Fujitsu, which sells a lot of smartphones in Asia but none in the U.S., showed off its own prototype Android handset based on Nvidia’s quad-core processor at Mobile World Congress. 

The as-yet-unnamed 4.6-inch Fujitsu Tegra 3 smartphone sports a 4.6-inch, 1280 x 800 screen that looked very sharp in our brief hands-on, but not as colorful as the AMOLED screen on the Samsung Galaxy or the Super LCD panel on the HTC One X. We’re not sure whether it was the screen or the software build or something else, but the screens on the three sample devices we played with didn’t always recognize our swipes.

The black, matte plastic chassis on the Fujitsu Tegra 3 phone looks rough, unfinished, and downright ugly, but we can only assume that Fujitsu will make some changes to the design before launch. Like HTC, LG, and ZTE, Fujitsu does not agree with Google’s decision to make Ice Cream Sandwich’s navigation buttons virtual icons. In fact, the company disagrees so strongly that it is using hard plastic, physical navigation buttons below the screen rather than the less-obtrustive flat capacitive buttons used by others.

On its back side, the Fujitsu Tegra 3 smartphone sports a whopping 13.3-MP camera that’s low-light sensitive and capable of shooting at ISO 25600. We can’t vouch for the quality of the images, but, when we fired up the camera app and hit the shutter button, the phone took a very noticeable couple of seconds to shoot, meaning that it’s not capable of the kind of high-speed shooting we’ve seen on HTC’s One Series.

Perhaps the most unique feature of Fujitsu’s Tegra 3 phone is a fingerprint reader, which sits just below the camera lens on the back of the device. The company currently offers biometric security on a number of its phones so the Tegra 3 phone is just following their lead. Unfortunately, there was no software on the Tegra 3 that we could use to test the reader.

As far as software goes, the demo units on display had nothing more than stock Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, with a couple of gaming apps installed and a bright pink wallpaper on one of the devices. Perhaps Fujitsu and its carriers will make some significant changes to the default look of Android before this comes out.

Though we did not have the opportunity to surf the web or play videos on the Fujitsu Tegra 3 smartphone, we were able to play a game of the demanding jet ski racing game Riptide GP, which we’ve tested before on Tegra 3 tablets. As on the Galaxy Transformer Prime tablet, Riptide GP was speedy and detailed with lots of gorgeous water effects. 

Though Fujitsu has no name for its Tegra 3 phone, a rep did tell us it was likely to be a member of the “Arrow” line of handsets. No word yet on pricing or availability, but it’s not likely to come to the U.S. 

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