Popular Posts

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Why the N9 has no forward back button

I don't know about you but one of the things I enjoy most about a new phone is finding new features that I didn't realise had been sitting there all that time. Even better is when you identify what you thought was an omission only to realise that the designers turned out to be smarter than you (surprised?)

Today's little nugget of a discovery seems pretty simple. When you are typing in a URL or something and you stuff up, you want to delete one letter but you don't want to backspace everything to get there. So you use the left arrow and the right arrow to make your way slowly through the address to remove the delinquent letter. However, there is no such button on the keyboard. And this is why. 

If you tap and hold down the text field, whether it be the location bar or a field in a form, a magnifying glass will appear which allows you to move your finger to the left and right like a mouse pointer, moving the cursor to your desired position. It will look a little something like this:


For N9 users, try it out and leave your comments below if you also did not know about this (it wasn't in the user guide!)

By the way, the N9 does have a forward and back button for the browser. It just doesn't appear when there is no need for it.

4 comments:

  1. It actually was in the user guide. Whole guide -> Start and basic usage -> Type text -> Use virtual keyboard -> At the bottom as a hint. Anyway it's a cool feature and much better than the old arrow keys IMO.

    I really like this site. Keep it up!

    ReplyDelete
  2. The N9 is pretty cool, but this has been in the iPhone since 2007...

    ReplyDelete
  3. This doesn't seem to work for messaging, unless I am doing something wrong, or is there an alternative for messaging.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hahaha fantastic!!! This phone kepps surprising me again and again with it's suptility :)
    It does work in messaging btw, just tried. I got PR 1.3

    ReplyDelete