Interacting with small devices

Dan Gillmor’s post Making More of Handhelds reports some interesting things from a big HCI conference about UIs on small devices

The fish-eye view over calendar info looks interesting, although I think it’d require a touchscreen to work properly (still not sure about touchscreens - I tend to agree with the MS Smartphone team that a lot of phone interaction is done one-handed. I guess if I only needed to use the touchscreen for the right tasks, where I didn’t want to do it one-handed then that would be alright, but then it has to be natural as to which tasks used which mechanism…)

I don’t like the peephole window, horizontal scrolling is just too intrusive, but looking at using the orientation of the device, and movement of the device is something I’ve discussed with others before - nice if someone can get it to work but it has to cope with different orientations of the user too, I’m going to want it to work still if I’m lying down using it as much as it does when I’m stood up…