HP Jornada 560 Series

Blanche writes: "infoSync has got a photo and confirmed specifications for the new HP Jornada 560 series of handhelds, which will be the first PDA to be delivered with Pocket PC 2002 OS - also known as Merlin. On top of this; the savvy gadget are also rumored to be provided with speech-recognition technology."

So they moved the Start button to a _worse_ place?

[soboroff]

I love how in the screenshot (which is undoubtedly a mockup), the Start button is now in the upper left corner. (It might have been this way for a while, I'm a Palm user so I'm ignorant here.)

Flash back to the Newton. They put all the buttons on the bottom of the screen. The close-box? Bottom right (or left for lefties). Why? Because you can tap the buttons without your hand obscuring the screen. Hey, maybe it was slow, but at least they thought about the interface.

This is something that so few palmtop developers can get right. Another example (just to be ecumenical) is the truly beautiful Palm app DrawIt... the toolbars are inscrutably along the top of the screen, so you can't actually see your drawing while you tap a new tool.

Come on, guys... the palmtop is not the desktop, the stylus is not a mouse (thank heavens!).