Symbian calls characters in the dialler a “brainstorm idea”

By Paul | Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 | Comments

On Symbians blog they recently posted about their recent brainstorm ideas. One of the features was an alphanumeric dialler keypad, which was an idea taken from their community.

While I’m glad Symbian are listening to their community, honestly I am, but why did it take the community to push Symbian in to adding such basic functionality?

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ZeDestructor

I don't think there's really much of an issue when it comes to dialing numbers, but nice nevertheless and may be useful with smart dialing too as you "know" which "letters" you're typing in

paul_t7

Hi Scott, we love your work. It was just amusing the way it read, that's all.

Scott Weiss

Hi, I'm Scott Weiss, UI Technology Manager at Symbian. I'd like to clear up a couple things about how we work: we are an open source software foundation, and all of our design, development, and most of our documentation come from the Symbian community. We don't have developers on staff, nor designers, nor usability researchers. My focus is to rally the community's support, and then do matchmaking with contributors to get the UI fixes and innovations into the platform. The alpha characters in the dialler was a logical oversight in the platform, we got the suggestion in the UI Brainstorm, and Ixonos agreed to code it. We showcased it as a case study because it's a nice little success story. The Single Tap improvements are another success story that is much more exciting, to be certain, but we want to acknowledge good work all the way 'round.

BD

Poor understanding of how the Symbian Foundation (or any other software foundation) *should* work. The more contribution the community is making the better. They're not going to reject ideas for being 'too obvious' and accepting such an idea doesn't mean nobody in Symbian thought of it. Even if they had they shouldn't directly add it themselves. Again this is up to the community.