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The Register: When Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia was abandoning its development of its own smartphone platforms and APIs, and betting the farm on somebody else’s, many people asked why it was necessary.Nokia had spent 15 years trying to develop and maintain its own software, which it regarded as strategic to maintaining its independence. Elop’s decisions have ensured that Nokia didn’t just get another option to run alongside its own, but it would abandon these, writing off the investments it had already made. In his opinion, these weren’t good enough. Read more…

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Absolute Gadget: It would seem that just about everyone who’s anyone is lining up to kick the iPhone. A new report from a Chicago-based usability consultancy reckons that texters have a hard time using the phone’s new touch screen. According to researchers at User Centric, their study found that while overall design and usability of the iPhone was good, the iPhone’s touch keyboard was a weak point for many users.

Around 60 users were asked to enter specific text messages and complete several mobile device tasks. Twenty of these participants were iPhone owners who owned their phones for at least one month. Twenty more participants were owners of traditional hard-key QWERTY phones and another twenty were owners of numeric phones who used the “multi-tap” method of text entry.

The results found that when compared to hard-key QWERTY phone owners using their personal phones, iPhone owners’ rate of text entry on the iPhone was equally rapid. However, iPhone owners made more errors during text entry and also left significantly more errors in the completed messages.

While iPhone owners made an average of 5.6 errors/message on their own phone, hard-key QWERTY owners made an average of 2.1 errors/message on their own phone. iPhone owners also left an average of 2.6 errors/completed message created on the iPhone compared to an average of 0.8 errors/completed message left by hard-key QWERTY phone owners on their own phone.

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