I recently bought a Samsung Edge for Samsung Gear development, and went abroad for a few weeks so ended up using it with the SIM card for that country while still keeping my phone alive.
Apart from the benefits of the edge "design" not being too relevant for me, the biggest issue I had was accidentally hitting notifications when I pulled the phone out of my pocket. At one point I somehow accidentally deleted an app, or something that resulted in the app being removed from the phone entirely. Granted I was travelling, doing a lot of hiking and so perhaps it was more aggressive handling than normal - but in general I found that not having an edge on the phone really hindered my ability to use it, and forced me to be extra careful in handling of the phone in regular use as well as when I pulled it out of my pocket or back in.
I've been seeing a lot of these "edge less" screens and a lot of other features that people don't really care about, with a move away from what customers actually want. Like removing the headphone port in the iPhone 7 or going in this direction with edge to edge screens and making the phone thinner and thinner but faster and faster (meaning less battery life, and spottier performance since the CPU needs to be throttled).
Smart phones have been a commodity for a bit now - and the important things are the incremental improvements in battery life, performance, screen resolutions and graphics, networking efficiency and most importantly the services that power the phone which is effectively a way to access the internet.
I had a similar issue with places Android phones typically place a standalone "back" button, the bottom right of a phone. When reaching across the phone with my thumb I would constantly bump this back button. The experience was so frustrating on a Galaxy S3 that I change to an iPhone.
I wondered if they have done enough user experience researching how people use the phone. I can't believe I'm the only person who ran into this issue. It's something I've come to admire with Apple products. They're very polished and I rarely run into experiences like what I had bumping the back button on my old S3.
That drove me crazy too - cap-sense buttons have been largely a customer experience fail, so not sure why it's gone on this long. I'm a big fan of the tactile "bump" feedback, and it's way too easy to do something by accident for even the most careful user.
It's funny how Apple did the "no buttons thing" because they were responding to a tech ecosystem that had a button for everything at the cost of the user getting overwhelmed. However, now there's no sanity in the other direction - with people avoiding buttons and making things so streamlined that they're harder to use.
In every age there's an innovate response to a cliche, but ultimately this becomes a cliche in of itself :)
Same, even with a small and narrow android phone i have to consciously make a spider-like gesture to reach anything on the left side of the screen and sometimes trigger finds just by holding it by the edges because the screen is so close to the edges.
A phone with even less space around the screen would just drive me entirely mad.
And to think, just a few years ago with the E6-00 i had a phone that i could operate mostly blind. Nowadays i can't even take my phone out of the pocket without being careful and conscious about it.
Posting this to get some initial feedback. Online build is behind development by a few weeks, but would love to hear thoughts. Right now the biggest "next" feature I'm looking to implement is fully functional audio tracks.
Also sorry for the blatant design rip-offs from Ableton. This is a super early alpha and I haven't dug into design too much - although there are notable departures as well :)
I was worried about that too when we first started to give it to musicians. We had to test this design out first, before we launched it. I'm not a piano player, but I would produce music on flights to China and back a lot when we were doing manufacturing for the gTar and I would get these midi controllers and they would all break going in and out of my backpack.
That's where the design initially came from, but I knew one of the most important things is that the keys had to be full size. Mini key designs always left something to be desired, and I would just use my laptop keyboard instead - which seemed to be more effective and in the long run more convenient too - since these controllers were really cumbersome.
So when I first gave the design to musicians I was scared that they would immediately reject it. The Keys were full size, but the interface was different than what they were used to. But they made zero mention of it, and you can see in later half the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guKRk3WPc40
I know no feedback sounds like bad feedback, but in this case it was really positive. These guys would immediately start wailing on keys like it was natural. These are guys that do this for a living, and I didn't hear one comment about the difference in the keys from a traditional piano.
So take it for what it is - We weren't ignorant of the fact that Keys isn't a traditional design, but all the same - this approach also makes it significantly more portable - and the great thing about AMON (the networking stuff) is we could always make a traditional version and it would still work and link with the non-traditional layout.
Interesting -- I'd be curious to see what actual musicians would say. It really depends on the type of music you're building with it, I'd say.
I'm not primarily a keyboardist, but I use them; in this case it would surely be tricky to play anything that uses the black keys much; your hands have patterns memorized that (I'd imagine) would be tough to adapt to having the black keys on a separate row.
But because it's MIDI, it really does depend on what you're building, and it might not matter. Recording simple snatches of melody would be fine if you keep away from chromatic lines -- e.g., if you want to add a line that's in C minor, just record it in A minor (all white keys except maybe the G#), then transpose it in a few seconds.
You wouldn't play the Flight of the Bumblebee on it, though.
I can't disagree with you, these haven't gone out into the wild yet - but I will say I've seen some truly gifted piano players / keyboardists take to this without any mention of strange finger/hand issues with the layout.
I'll be honest, I'm not a keyboard player. I designed this to be truly mobile and portable without making compromises on the key size, which my theory is that having a full scale keyboard is more important than the traditional design of the keys. The former makes the device useful, and the later makes it familiar but also prevents it from being very portable without shrinking the keys or otherwise compromising on other dimensions.
I've seen people shred on Keys, it's pretty awesome to see, since I can barely play Yankee Doodle - but I'm getting a lot better!
Also - sorry for the double comment. The design was definitely influenced by similar form factor keyboards like the Op-1 and QuNexus although the latter does not use actual keys but is an MPC like pressure sensitive pad rather than a push/levered/actuated key. Also, in general, the design was influenced by the status quo of how producers / musicians approach such MIDI instruments and why/how they're used.
The biggest difference in our design is the exclusion of all controls, buttons knobs and so on which means that even though the Keys device is about the same size as some of these other portable devices, the keys themselves are nearly the same size and layout ratios as traditional. In other words, full size keys not mini size which is hard to tell in the pictures. This feature, of both our personal opinions and the feedback of professionals we gave Keys to, is significantly more important than any other in a truly useful as well as portable keyboard.
The fact that all controls are removed and the design is purely keys also allows for the modular nature, and the ability to connect Keys together in various ways as well as other modules.
The proximity sensor is indeed an IR based sensor similar in design to the D-Beam that Roland employs in some of their keyboards. The impetus for these sensors was the need to add a swipe gesture to transpose the keyboard up and down - the actual distance detection was a nice bonus which we exposed by it outputting control channel data.
Each sensor sends on a separate control channel, and when linking multiple keys devices together, the control channels are transposed so adjacent keys sensors each send CC on their own channel (so each sensor is mappable, and in the same fashion for a given configuration of devices)
Keys has very close to full ratio keys to a standard piano. If you take it and put it up against a normal piano you'll see the keys span about the same length as two octaves, maybe by a difference of 2-3 mm.
This was a very critical aspect of the design and actually led to the implementation of the proximity sensors. We had to remove all controls to get this size but still be about the width of a 13" laptop - and the need for certain controls like octave transposition was the impetus for looking into other control methodologies like proximity based gestures.
Thanks Tim. I'm definitely not innocent when it comes to making assumptions on the internet. I feel like we've all come to expect a certain standard and forget that companies spend massive resources to provide for those standards where a smaller company may not be able to match up.
Definitely surprised me that this came from a backer through. We get this kind of response relatively often from people who buy on our website, and from that vantage point they don't know it's only 4-5 people in a small office somewhere. But crowdfunding was meant to empower the underdog after all.
That's a pretty great breakdown. When it comes to the actual costs of KS and crowd funding we did ok. Profit isn't the big goal with that as much as getting exposure / marketing and proving the market.
I think we were a net positive overall, but not by a big margin or anything.
That bad boy has been sitting in our office for a few months now and it never gets old hearing it every time someone goes to the bathroom or something =)
Apart from the benefits of the edge "design" not being too relevant for me, the biggest issue I had was accidentally hitting notifications when I pulled the phone out of my pocket. At one point I somehow accidentally deleted an app, or something that resulted in the app being removed from the phone entirely. Granted I was travelling, doing a lot of hiking and so perhaps it was more aggressive handling than normal - but in general I found that not having an edge on the phone really hindered my ability to use it, and forced me to be extra careful in handling of the phone in regular use as well as when I pulled it out of my pocket or back in.
I've been seeing a lot of these "edge less" screens and a lot of other features that people don't really care about, with a move away from what customers actually want. Like removing the headphone port in the iPhone 7 or going in this direction with edge to edge screens and making the phone thinner and thinner but faster and faster (meaning less battery life, and spottier performance since the CPU needs to be throttled).
Smart phones have been a commodity for a bit now - and the important things are the incremental improvements in battery life, performance, screen resolutions and graphics, networking efficiency and most importantly the services that power the phone which is effectively a way to access the internet.