Slashdot Asks: How Do You Navigate Your Smartphone?

There are many different ways to navigate a smartphone. Some devices employ capacitive touch navigation buttons in favor of on-screen navigation buttons for the back, home and overview commands. Others, such as the recently released Moto Z2 Force and Moto Z2 Play, feature a mini trackpad under the display that lets users navigate their device through a series of swipes (on-screen navigation buttons are used by default, but the option to use the "one button nav" mini trackpad can be enabled in the settings). The upcoming iPhone 8, for example, may feature a software bar in lieu of a physical/virtual home button, introducing new gesture controls for returning to the home screen and switching between apps.

How do you navigate your smartphone? Given the many different options available on the market, do you think there is one method of navigation that trumps the others, or is it a classic case of "different strokes for different folks?"

Windows Phone 8: Live tiles

[DogDude]

I use the live tiles set up on the home page of my Windows Phone. Super simple.

Re:

[unixisc]

Or you could swipe right & see the entire list of apps there

What smartphone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I navigate with maps.

Re:

[hughbar]

You forgot the obligatory 'you insensitive clod'. But seriously, I don't have a smartphone and live quite happily without 'apps' they are insecure, data-thieving, usually badly-written, unnecessary and break the 'universalist' philosophy of the web. As usual, when I comment on this, here's a list of possible permissions:

ACCESS_LOCATION_EXTRA_COMMANDS ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE ACCESS_NOTIFICATION_POLICY ACCESS_WIFI_STATE BLUETOOTH BLUETOOTH_ADMIN BROADCAST_STICKY CHANGE_NETWORK_STATE CHANGE_WIFI_MULTICAST_STA

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Sounds like a Catch-22 situation if you stop needing a laptop upon acquiring it.

The BEST way.

[damnbunni]

I use the keyboard, damnit.

A Keyboard? Pfftt. Luxury

[rsilvergun]

I use punch cards the way God and Nature intended.

Re: A Keyboard? Pfftt. Luxury

[aliquis]

I just wiggle my magical probing stick until I find the right one.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I use punch cards the way God and Nature intended.

You mean as fashionable bookmarks?

How do you navigate your smartphone?

[turkeydance]

put it in my pocket and look out the window of my car.

Re:How do you navigate your smartphone?

[Mr D from 63]

WTF? How do you navigate your smartphone? That's your fucking question? Texas is flooding, the earth is going to shit, and your biggest question is how to use a freaking product that my grandma can use (in her grave)? I navigate the damn thing with the freakin GUI provided and don't really GARA if someone else is swiping while I'm typing, or wiping.

Let's ponder the truly hard questions in life;
How do you turn off your lights at night?
How do you deal with seeds in seedless watermelons?
How do you decide how long to heat food in your microwave?

Re:

[thegarbz]

How do you turn off your lights at night?

With great difficulty. You see the electrician who wired this apartment has two sets of two double pole switches at opposite sides of the living room. The idea was that each set could independently control the two lights in the living room, but the problem is the lights in the living room are wired up in parallel. This leads to 16 possible combinations of switches of which only 4 are capable of turning off the lights in the living room in addition to the problem that I am unable to control both lights indep

Re:

[Fly Swatter]

I wanted to replace my motorola flip phone with another flip, but the choices were junk and more junk. Finally just gave up and bought a cheap windows phone. Yea it's obsolete already but still better made than every current flip phone.

Also I am glad I didn't choose an android phone. My android tablet doesn't like to take my taps, i get the animation when I press but then it just ignores my finger half the time like nothing happened. Do I have a fat thumb? maybe. If my phone acted like that it would have go

I talk to it

[El Cubano]

I just talk to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

I organize it & use search

[ThomK]

I was in repair shop once (because my iPhone's phone jack wouldn't take the stereo mini cable I was trying to stick into it anymore. I thought something was bent inside the hole, turned out it was just jammed with pocket lint.) and the clerk did something I now do every day.

She took my phone, and instead of hunting for the settings icon, she swiped down, hit the letters "se" and the settings icon presented itself! She f*cking searched for it! I do that with spotlight on my mac all the time, I don't know why it didn't occur to me to do that on my iPhone, but I sure do now.

So to answer the question:
1. I try to delete apps aggressively, that helps.
2. I put the most used stuff on the first page, leaving empty space if that's required.
3. I group games together and tuck them away.
4. I search for stuff I use once in a while.

Its an ongoing process. The problem is there's a long tail graph of usage of apps. My iMessage, phone and Skype apps get used a ton, my sense app and a few games get used once a day, settings etc, once a week and a hand full once a month. The remainder probably need to be deleted.

The iOS app/interface manager isn't that great. Sure I have full control, but damn, help me out a bit. Doesn't the windows phone sort apps by usage? That would be amazingly helpful. So would a notification of what apps should probably be deleted.

I don't want that much fine grained control & it's stressful to see all that crap on your phone.

Re: I organize it & use search

[Dixie_Flatline]

iOS 11 will automatically delete old apps that havenâ(TM)t been used in a long time if you ask it to. Itâ(TM)ll keep the data around, and you can just restore it from the App Store if you want it again

Re:

[rwa2]

Yeah, I'm something of a minimalist. Here's my homescreen on Android 7:
https://i.imgur.com/xswIxHi.pn... [imgur.com]

Just a big ol' analog clock and my most commonly accessed apps from the ground up.
I prefer groups to screens, as much as I like the background scrolling animation. But even then there are just two groups for "Google" and "Nav" apps.
There's just one more screen for widgets: the Google New/Weather ticker, the calendar, and a gTasks Todo list. That's pretty much it.

Previously I had additional groups for:
*

I don't have one

[Anonymous Coward]

You insensitive clod!

Moto G5 Plus here

[willoughby]

It's not really a trackpad but instead a fingerprint reader which also recognizes just two rudimentary gestures - touch for home button, touch & hold for fingerprint reader, swipe left to go back and swipe right for recent apps. But, still, I like that in normal use I don't need to wear out a physical button. Something else will break, anyway, I suppose.

Ass swipes....

[__aaclcg7560]

I was doing a PC refresh project that required getting underneath desks to set up the cable for the file transfer between old and new PCs. I had a touch screen smartphone that was getting wonky. Every time I put the smartphone in my back pocket and got underneath the desk, an ass swipe would call my boss. He would hear nothing but me grunting or farting from the hard work. That would happen four or five times a night. I had to leave the smartphone on my cart to prevent the ass swiping from happening.

Re:

[__aaclcg7560]

Only Slashdot's resident tub-of-lard "bicyclist linebacker with hundreds of pounds of solid muscle on his frame" would consider "bending over to stretch a cable from one computer to another under a desk" to be "hard work."

The old Dell workstations weighed 40 pounds. The newer models weigh less than.

Re:

[__aaclcg7560]

Seriously - there is NOTHING in IT that remotely resembles hard physical labor.

How about unboxing 750 PCs and 1,500 monitors, disposing the packing material, deploying the new systems, and recycling the old systems?

Moving 1,000+ new PCs and 2,000+ monitors, and all the old PCs and monitors, on carts for two city blocks in each direction?

Or building out a data center with rows and rows of racks to fill out with equipment?

Or having to move an empty server rack on wheels by yourself because you're a big guy (aka Mr. Muscles) and six skinny guys move the other one?

Or did you think that th

Re:

[__aaclcg7560]

Oh, that explains your weight loss!

That explains why I have the most stupidest trolls following me on Slashdot.

stylus

[Trax3001BBS]

http://i49.tinypic.com/rbejqu.... [tinypic.com]

Physical Buttons

[ShakaUVM]

I've had bad experience with touchscreens. Right now, I have a software back button on the corner of my touchscreen and it just won't recognize any touches. Sometimes I can tap at it for five or ten seconds to get it to register, but most of the time is is just.... dead.

However, my phone has a single hardware button, and that allows the phone to still be usable.

This is the second phone this has happened on, so I think physical buttons are now a requirement for me.

Re:

[skids]

Yeah I am forced to get a new work phone more often than I want and have had to grit my teeth lately and go with the soft buttons due to other features. Really would prefer the haptics of a button with a contact behind it so I can feel it click and then know whether the phone is just being slow or it ignored my touches.

As to TFA, I disable the lockscreen pin or whatever other trash and have it only wake up during a side-button press, to keep it from turning on the screen in my pocket, then I combine the ca

By yelling at it!

[Mr.CRC]

I navigate my Moto E go-phone mostly by yelling and screaming at it, threatening to toss it, and uttering lengthy expletives about the programmers who created its perplexing and idiotic UI.

It took me a few weeks to figure out how to answer the damn thing. It's still unreliable, as hitting *anything* by accident instead of performing the correct touch gesture makes it leave the answering context. I had to look up the manual (yeah the freakin' *manual*) to learn how to answer my phone! You would think they could have printed a little "swipe that-a-way to answer phone -->" on the screen to give new operators a clue. But no... If you fail to answer it with the right gesture, then it provides a menu of options including everything EXCEPT "Answer the fucking phone." There is some way to get back to having a chance to answer it, but I forget what it is. Then of course it always turns on the camera as the side button activates it.

It is a hideous thing!

If I didn't have Linux for my PCs, I would be extremely unhappy with the computing world, because everything else is borderline unusable by comparison.

I would rather just have a simple phone. Maybe with an .mp3 player feature. Of course, such a thing no longer exists :-(

With my thumb

[fox171171]

And sometimes a finger.

Using the assistant

[RhettLivingston]

Even if I touch "home", it's just to hold it and bring the assistant up without saying "OK Google". I then say "open xxxxxx" where xxxxxx is any app on my phone and it does it - even if it is nowhere to be found as it often is on my spouse's phone (who hates icons covering the background).

With the assistant, I do a lot now without even looking at my phone.

More complicated things like sending messages have become "text xxxx to yyyy" followed by answering "yes" when it verifies whether I'd like to send it - o

Siri

[tsa]

I use Siri for all my phone navigation. You learn a lot about the world that way, because most of the times she doesn't understand me.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Regular touchscreen, swipe

[Qbertino]

I use the touchscreen, but I also use swipe. Way easier and faster than typing (most of the time) but can suck if I mix English with German in one textarea.

What other options are there?

[XB-70]

I use a Blackberry Thumb Operated Trackwheel on my 7290, you insensitive clod!!

MG5

[jf_moreira]

Have a Moto G5, I navigate using the finger sensor. One quick touch, main screen. Swipe to the right, shows background running tasks, swipe to the left closes or return to the prior screen. That's all, folks!