Qando learned how to use the keyboard

Finally, just when I was about to give up on Qando, the mobile info service for public transport in and around Vienna, they fixed their major [1] usability problem on the E71.

Like I reported months ago, they purposely emulated a T9 input even on the full querty/quertz E71 keyboard. So you only could use (by guessing mostly) the numeric keys of the full keyboard...

Finally, they removed that piece of code and seem to rely on S60 and JavaME to handle the keyboard by themselves ;-)

Thanks.
Might become more useful now... I'll be trying it.

GPS still does not work, btw...

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[1] and we are talking really MAJOR MAJOR here

Qando being really really stupid

Qando is an excellent service for quering up to date (and realtime) information about the (mainly) Viennese public transport.
I used to know it from the iPhone - or rather from my iPod touch only, where it was not THAT useful, because it only worked when I had a WiFi connection ... it does an excellent job on a fully GPRS/3G connected iPhone, though.

Found out that it is also available as a JavaME version for more or less or other handsets, including my E71.

Installs OK, starts fine, however, it could NOT access my GPS device (a common problem for JavaME apps).

But I wouldn't even let me enter station/address data by hand.
There is a search input field, but I failed miserably to enter anything there...

...except for numbers, I found out after a while.

And then I played with it a little more, and noticed that - get this! - emulate a T9 input, even when the phone has a full QWERTY keyboard!
So if I hit e.g. the 4-key 3 times it will walk through g-h-i... like it would on a 12 key phone[1].

Aaaaaa... how stupid can one be as a programmer. Who in this century (or the last 20-30 years for that mattters) codes keyboard input and key-stroke-decoding by hand! Let the opsys do that! That's what it is here for. Even on a phone.

So please, Qando programmers, you can do better! And it's a lot easier for you!
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[1] or whatever the correct number of keys on a numeric-pad-only phone is.