gdgt

The problem is that something as basic as the placement of Home, Back, Menu, and Search keys keeps changing from phone to phone, without any real reason why. If you go from one Android phone to the next, there's little if any consistency between them, and you have to relearn your muscle memory to get used to the new phone.

Regarding your analogy, I'd argue that the gas/break pedals and steering wheel are equivalent to the phone's main buttons. The screen, microphone, and speaker are more like the windows and mirrors. The pedals (and buttons) help you navigate through the car/phone, whereas the windows and mirrors (and screen and speaker) allow you to view the world within and outside of the car/phone.

This may not matter as much to those who get a new phone every couple of years, but for people who use multiple phones or upgrade often, this is a big problem. This has nothing to do with the iPhone, and nobody's advocating that Android's button layout should be the same as the iPhone's. All Peter's saying is that the Android experience is very inconsistent between devices, so that a few basic things are standardized.

I personally like the idea of consumer choice, in the sense that some phones have physical keyboards, others have trackballs, d-pads, whatever. But at least the Home/Menu/Back/Search buttons, the volume rocker, and a physical camera button should be kept consistent among Android devices, at least within a single company.

PCs and smartphones are very different, even MSFT has acknowledged that when they introduced Windows Phone 7. Phones are more personal than PCs. You can't just replace buttons unless you change a phone (actually this was Steve Job's point when he introduced the iPhone back in 2007) unless you get a new one - which isn't really feasible when you just signed up for a 2-year contract.

You call it "fragmentation", I call it "available choices in the consumer marketplace". I don't see what the big deal is. It's not as if you're going to be getting a different phone every month. And even if you were, if each was exactly the same as the last doing so would be pointless.

yeah its not really a problem with the hardware, so i disagree with this whole line, but with the OS it is a problem, if every phone has a different OS version out there then there isn't a good base of customers for the developers to write apps for.

This is an apt assessment.

This is very true. Nevertheless, imho Google should put some hardware guidelines - not necessarily as strict as MSFT does with Windows Phone 7. I could see a minimum standard button layout (I specifically like the Nexus One's but that's me) and a hardware shutter button for the camera apart from volume rocker and sleep/wake button. This could also help regular people when upgrading.

And Acer Liquid is : Home / Search / Back / Menu (so now we are near to the complete cyclic permutation)

On second thought, programmers would have a much easier life if all phones share a minimum button layout requirement

No, I'm talking about physical keys.

I thought when they released the G1 and spoke about Android they gave a small subset of standards when it came to those buttons. Or was it just "use these how you please"

On my eris those keys are all soft and I have two hard keys for anwering & ending calls. My bad for the confusion.

Those aren't soft keys, those are actually capacitive keys, but still physical keys. But I know what you mean!

I think you all may have lost sight of the forest for the trees: isn't "soft keys" an archaic term in a discussion on smartphones?

For better or worse, and despite the nomenclature, buttons with a singular function weren't really invited to the "smartphone" party (despite crashing it a couple times...)

That said, phone calls are (arguably) no longer THE primary feature of a "mobile devices"...