I'm not going to argue against your general point — you may be right — but I'm afraid I have some issues with your examples.


I don't know if you accidentally misused the term "context menu", or if I'm being overprecise in my definition, but the dedicated Android menu button is a contextless menu. (Or, I guess, a "current-page-context menu".) Actual context menus, that is, menus that are relevant only to a specific UI element, are accessed by a long press on the element itself.


I've not played with iPhoneOS that much, but precision placement of a cursor in text is a pain. I think I've seen that iPhoneOS provides a transient zoom-in for cursor movement, which is nice, but that's actually somewhat innovative, and I'll bet it's patented. Moreover, probably in a way that Google saw as tortiously defensible.

So I do understand your point here, but I don't really have a problem with an additional interface that (almost certainly) adds virtually nothing to the size of the device. The N1 trackball does do double-duty as a hard button.


I don't really know what you're talking about here at all.