Nokia 5800 full review -3nd of 4

I do think there is room for further touch optimisations. For example, many S60 applications use tabs to switch between screens (e.g. in the Contacts application you can switch between the main list and the groups list), but the tabs only take up about half the available screen space, it would be better if they used all the space, thus giving you a bigger target to hit with your finger. Similarly there are multiple instances, in landscape mode, when only two of the five buttons of the toolbar are used; in some places this is for sake of simplicity, but for others it is a wasted opportunity. There are also instances where the implementation is sub-optimal using finger touch, the best example of this is the scroll bar in landscape mode (it is too easy to inadvertently select something to right or left by mistake).

There are four distinct methods of entering text on the 5800 (and five, if you include Bluetooth keyboards): on screen, virtual alphanumeric keypad with T9 or multi-tap (portrait), mini-QWERTY keyboard (portrait and landscape), full screen QWERTY (landscape) and handwriting recognition (portrait or landscape). Both the alphanumeric keypad and the full QWERTY keyboard take up the whole screen, when you touch a text entry area they'll occupy the whole screen. By contrast, handwriting recognition and mini-QWERTY appear in a 'window' floating above the active screen. You can switch between the different methods via a pop-up menu (the button with a keyboard icon).

The great benefit of the alphanumeric keypad is that it can be used one handed as you would with a physical keypad. It also works particularly well with finger touch as the on screen keys are larger. It is a complete implementation, letting you use multi-tap or predictive text (T9). Indeed the touch screen allows for some extras, including showing capitalisation, a selectable list of matching words in T9 (usually selected using the star key) and the ability to change cursor position by touch.

The full QWERTY keyboard really needs two hands to be used effectively. I found I achieved about the same speed as with the alphanumeric keypad, but that's probably because I'm more used to using such keypads. There is no automatic text correction software, which is a shame, as mis-hits do inevitably occur; in the future, it would be good to see something similar to the Nokia E71's implementation here.
The handwriting recognition method is necessarily stylus driven and uses a floating window which can be moved around the screen. No special symbols are required; you just need to write each character individually (either lower case or upper case works fine). Recognition occurs as you enter text, with each drawn letter remaining on screen for around half a second (enough time to cross a t or dot an i). Capitalisation occurs automatically or can be forced by an on screen button; while the recognition includes punctuation, less common characters are not as well catered for and are easy to enter via the on screen symbol/character button. Recognition was generally good and can be improved by training the recognition software in the phone's settings. You can also create your own 'character' shortcuts for regularly-used text strings.
For text entry, I tended to use a mix of the alphanumeric keypad and full screen QWERTY, principally because these work best with finger touch. However, it is great to see that the user has a choice; some methods are more suited to certain markets than others, for example, handwriting recognition is likely to be popular in some Asian countries. On occasion, Nokia rightly receives criticism for having multiple ways of doing things in its UI, but in this instance it is exactly the right decision. While I suspect many users will settle on one method and forget the others are there, the critical point is that they have a choice.