Neonode N2 touchscreen phone review. Really small and responsive
iPhone may have set a new standard in touchscreen responsiveness and usability, that everybody is still trying to catch up to a year later. And they have patented a lot of capacitive touch technologies that went into making one.
But during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I found one really interesting device maker, that just might have already caught up with Apple, at least when it comes to the responsiveness of the touchscreens.
It’s Neonode and their new handset Neonode N2.
While looking at their PR materials I was pretty skeptical about the possible user experience of such a small device. After all, you do require a sizable display for finger touch interface to work.
And Neonode N2, which with it’s 47×77x14,7 mm dimensions, 60 g of weight and 2″ touchscreen display is smaller then a credit card, hardly seemed up to the task.
Well, having played a bit with it, I can say that it works. At least on first impression. Instead of capacitive or resistive touch, used in iPhone and other touchscreen phones, Neonode has developed it’s own optical/infrared touchscreen technology called ZForce, which hardly requires any touch to work.
Just swipe a finger gently over the display or tap it and you are scrolling through address book, selecting menu items, dialing a phone or typing a text message.
And the small size of the device has actually it’s own advantages. Thank’s to it, very responsive touchscreen and internally developed “neno” interface, single hand operation actually works very well on Neonode N2. That is, you can easily hold N2 in one hand and use it’s thumb to operate the phone and perform any functions on it. Just like you do on a non touch phone keypads.
Here’s short video of Neonode N2 in action:
Of course, Neonode N2 is not that good as a media player or the net browsing device.
But used for it’s primary purpose – as a mobile phone, it works great.
And it’s really portable. Instead of worrying where to carry it, you might be spending more time figuring out into which pocket it went, when you need to make a call.
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