Which was an influence on the first Android device, the HTC Dream. Swivel keyboard AND a trackball. It was pretty cool but unfortunately didn't catch on.
It seems like everyone but me hates the HTC micro-trackballs. I admit I've only spent a few minutes using one, but it seemed harmless at worst, and actually struck me as a very nice input device. Maybe I just have fond memories of my first laptop, an early Powerbook.
This is why I liked the older Android devices (as opposed to the new ones). Having physical buttons and a trackball were significantly better than both capacitive buttons and optical trackpads. Trackballs are significantly better than optical trackpads from a use-perspective. They work in all orientation, have finer grains of control, don't require awkward flicks to work, and have a much easier learning curve. The industry really needs to stop trying to the trendy thing and focus on things that work.
An old dumb phone of mine had a mini trackball I found immensely useful. The firmware (proprietary) was total garbage, but moving between menus was a breeze. Having a trackball rather than a touch interface means that icons and text don't need to be larger to be hit by a finger; all the user does is move the trackball until the relevant object is focused or text highlighted, then use it. Voila, lots of space saved for actual information.
I don't understand why the trackball died. I can move a mouse pointer much faster with it than with a trackpad.
Google's G1 had also a trackball. I think this was the only smartphone with a trackball.
Happy to see the love for trackballs here. I was using a trackball as a relief from hand joint pain and found it kind of nice and more exciting than a mediocre trackpad. (But: the idea is to have the input/pointing device of your choice!)
I miss when laptops had trackballs. It was the only time in history when I preferred the pointing device on laptops to a standard mouse! (back in the 90s I used to use trackballs on my desktops)
My BB had a trackball which worked spectacularly well. The replacement Android has a trackpad that is virtually useless for any fidelity and I gave up even trying to use it. Then again multi-touch is a usable alternative most of the time.
Trackballs date back to the 60s, at least. The original design advantage of a trackball was pursuit and target acquisition. They were developed for military radar operators to quickly move the focus to an inbound bogie, potentially supersonic. If they could acquire and track the target on air search radar, they could mark it twice on two consecutive sweeps of the air search radar, giving the fire control system a course and speed so the fire control radar had a better shot of getting a lock.
My first four years out of college I spent a lot of time in that space, so I got quite comfortable with trackballs. Now I use them exclusively on my desktop. My only complaint is they aren't embedded flush in the desktop :)
I wonder if we should return to the trackball. I have an old KVM keyboard that has one built-in, and it's not so bad. Seems like it wouldn't get in the way like a touchpad does. Why is it that we stopped using those?
Let's note has circular trackpad (It's traditional design, IMO it's bad now) so maybe OP mistook it for trackball. There's no laptop with trackball within a decade AFAIK.
Does anyone actually use that trackball for anything other than text selection, though?
Going from an iPhone to a Nexus One for about six months, I mostly wished that it wasn't there (except when I wanted to select and copy text, at which point I wished I was back on my iPhone).
Fun fact: There's a demo video from Xerox floating around the internet, where the researchers showed off GUIs that were controlled by both a mouse and a trackball.
One example was using the mouse to paint and the trackball to move a pallette-like widget around that was used to define/store colors and patterns (and functioned as an ad-hoc clipboard).
W.r.t. intuitive design, I find it kind of sad that type of interface wasn't developped further. I saw some of the same ideas pop up in Valve's VR demos lately, though.
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