VITO’s ZoomBoard 1.0 was my first review for JAMM, and so I thought it’d be cool to take a second look at the program with the introduction of its newest version. Peter’s already covered the new features, so I’m just going to give some quick impressions:

It looks great! (ok, I wrote more than that…but it’s after the jump!)

Layout and Appearance

First off, the keyboard looks a lot better. The layout key used to bleed off the edge, and now it’s beside the keyboard and everything looks a lot slicker. If you compare the two screenshots here, the new ZoomBoard has a very toned, black look, whereas the old one looked more playful and cartooney. The 2.0 version also seems to have just a bit more room for the keys, which is always a good thing.

New Ways to Zoom Zoom

The two new zoom modes are a good bonus. Full zoom enlarges the whole keyboard upon pressing a key, and floating zoom just puts the magnifying glass right above the current key. I think both solutions are improvements upon the default, which had the magnifying glass right smack dab in the middle all the time.

Smart Zoom

Now this feature is a good idea. After you first zoom in, the zooming will happen "immediately" on subsequent taps on the touchscreen. This effect will disappear once you leave the screen alone for three seconds. This is quite useful, since I had always felt that the zooming took just a bit too long to start up in version 1.0. The problem is that even with smart zoom on, the zooming still can’t quite keep up with my taps on the screen. This could just be a matter of speed though, as my taps tend to be faster than my TyTN can zoom, and I often don’t see the magnifying glass pop up.

Better Landscape Support

Version 2.0 sports a new layout for landscape mode which is three rows tall, so you do end up saving some screen real estate. I’m actually quite pleasantly surprised by this part, and I’m glad the landscape isn’t just a sloppily flipped over version of the portrait mode.

Better Gesture Support

This area isn’t covered in their manual, so I’m just guessing at what features are available. You activate these by just "slashing" in a direction on the keyboard to activate the following: backspace (left), capitalize (up), enter (down), and space (right). The gesture support is a little difficult when using fingers (you have to move your finger too fast and too far), but the stylus makes it a lot more comfortable.

Still missing that extra something…

I don’t mean to be an elitist here, but there is still something missing from ZoomBoard that would make me really love it. I see it very much as a finger-based SIP, and, as such, I think it needs some sort of predictive text or smart correction system behind it. Making keys larger and easily correcting typos is one thing, but it doesn’t do anything for MY typing speed, which is what I want in an SIP. These sentiments echo from version 1.0.

Peter (Pedah) argues that the keyboard is a lot more comfortable and works very well with a stylus, but I just don’t see the advantage of using ZoomBoard in that case. If you are going to type words out letter-by-letter with a stylus, I think a user is fine with the default keyboard. If you want to have fast stylus input, then Tengo is a faster (subjective, of course) choices. If you can already see which letter you’re going to hit with your stylus, why would you need it zoomed in?

This is not to say that ZoomBoard doesn’t have its place, or that it’s not good. I think it fills a niche for people who like accuracy and typing as they would on a normal keyboard, but prefer to keep the stylus tucked in the device — and ZoomBoard 2.0 improves upon that experience for those users with its updated look and zooming enhancements.

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