Nice to see someone is attempting this. Physical keyboard and resistive touchscreen seem like pretty odd decisions though. I guess this is going to be as enthusiast-only as the previous Neo phones which is a shame.
I hate capacitive screens. They're great for tablets, but overly limiting on phones with small screens - especially "hacker-oriented" ones.
I used to code using on-screen keyboard with fingernails on my old Neo Freerunner. It maybe wasn't the greatest programming experience ever, but it worked for me and I had some great debugging sessions while in tram :) I can't imagine doing that if Freerunner had capacitive screen - even if there wouldn't be a bezel around the screen anymore.
People seem to hate resistive screens based on their experiences with poor ones (which is understandable, as most of them are pretty poor). However, a good one is a real pleasure to use, and I find the one used in N900 a good one.
s/odd/sane/:
This oddity you've identified is precisely the reason people like me are interested or even invested in the project.
Must everyone worship at the altar of smudgy screens
and ineffective text input? The N900 is the last phone
that was actually usable. And by usable I'm not only referring to the stylus/keyboard input duality, but also to the the fact that it's as trivial extendable as any reasonably open Linux system.
In fact, I'd wager that the two are very closely correlated:
the need to tinker and the desire to do so with sane input devices.
The N900 supports both touchscreen and physical keyboards, so you get the best of both and I'd wager the Neo900 continues this.
Personally I've always found the physical keyboard to be far more productive and have wondered why smartphone manufacturers didn't keep on making them.
I used to code using on-screen keyboard with fingernails on my old Neo Freerunner. It maybe wasn't the greatest programming experience ever, but it worked for me and I had some great debugging sessions while in tram :) I can't imagine doing that if Freerunner had capacitive screen - even if there wouldn't be a bezel around the screen anymore.
People seem to hate resistive screens based on their experiences with poor ones (which is understandable, as most of them are pretty poor). However, a good one is a real pleasure to use, and I find the one used in N900 a good one.