I blame the Treo 650. Before using it, I never cared at all if I had to take out / put away a stylus 500 times a day. It didn’t bother me to have to use the stylus to navigate through program menus and commands.

Now all that’s changed – I want nearly all things on my device to allow me to work one-handed with them. I really start to dislike an application if it forces me to use the stlyus just to navigate or access menus.

Treos are absolutely meant to be used one-handed, and the longer I had one the more I got used to doing things one-handed and without needing the stylus.

Now I use an 8125 (HTC Wizard variant) and the one-handed habits have carried over. I don’t mind using the stylus if I’m working with a ‘data input’ type application – like taking notes at a client site. That’s fine – I get along fine with the letter recognizer and can input text fairly quickly.

For simpler data entry programs – like time-tracking for example – where most of your entries can be included within drop downs or lists (what time did you start on a project, on what date etc), I really want to be able to use the D-pad to do all my navigating and selecting without getting the stylus out.

With programs that are geared towards viewing information – browsers, RSS readers, media players and the like – I absolutely want to be able to do everything one-handed. For example, I want to do the following set of common tasks without needing to think about using the stylus:

• Browse back to a favorite,
• Scroll through RSS feeds and select one to look through
• Navigate to and through options menus
• Choose to email a link to someone
• Pull up my contacts list and select the recipient from that list
• And send off a mail

There are a growing number of applications that are designed to take advantage of a device’s D-pad and make this one-handed working possible. NewsBreak – a great RSS reader – is one that fits in that category.

Unfortunately, there are a lot more Windows Mobile applications which are not very cleverly designed and not easy to work one-handed with.

I’d like to see a lot more Windows Mobile apps that are fully D-pad aware, that make more and better use of the in-built soft menus, and that are geared towards one-handed use.

Would like to hear others’ opinions – is it Long Live The D-Pad, Death to the Stylus, couldn’t care less about one-handed use  …

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