WANTED: Zunepad Feedback <stickied>

sorry for the misunderstanding. stoic is a negative troll lurking here forever. it just ticks me off the way he sits around and bashes people in a personal way for their opinions. your statements seem right on. i think i am gone as well. posters like stoic... have ruined this forum. bye bye

Must not feed trolls...
*Delete whole post*

Uh, classy sig stoic!

Overall I like the zune pad but here is my take on the issues with it:

1. Scrolling vertically works great but horizonally when I want to advance to the next or previous track or advance to a point in a video it rarely works with the first swipe.
2. Documentation that comes with the Zune would be helpful instead of online only. I did not realize that when scrolling vertically through list of songs that I can stop the scrolling by touching the pad. This is a very neat feature that I probably would have discovered soon enough but printed documentation would be helpful.
3. When I try to use the pad with gloves I cannot predict what the zune will do. Neither swiping nor clicking the actual edges of the pad works properly. The zune can't tell what I am doing apparently. As another MS employee explained in another thread, there are actually no physical buttons below the zune pad except the one "OK" button. So the zune guesses at which direction is clicked by where you finger is on the pad. So if the zune can't tell where your finger is when you click, it often "guesses" wrong. This is a disappointing design as I could live without the swiping feature but I would expect that the clicking should work regardless of whether I am wearing gloves or using some other foreign object to click.
   

 Alcuin29 wrote:

 Sinner667 wrote:

 Alcuin29 wrote:

If touch navigation is off, it should not have weird effects if two fingers are on the pad at the same time when you click one of the up down left or right buttons. My Zune 80 does this.

 

The Dpad is not a 4 way switch.  It depends on the zpad to tell it what direction is being pressed, as it is NOT a 4 way switch.

That doesn't make it any less of a design flaw.

I agree. This is totally a design flaw. The clicks should not depend on the touch feature. It should have a 4 way switch.

it's one button with 5 directions..........it'd be similar to an analog stick on a controller you could say.  However if you're using two fingers and have the touch turned off it's going to behave oddly.  One button, one center of balance, etc etc, two fingers throws it off.  If you've used the Zune 30 you might have a different outlook on it as the 1 button, 5 directions, touch (on/off) pad is much more efficeint.

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Hold your breath someone is about to tell the greatest lie EVER!

Love the Zunepad!  It took very little time to get the hang of it...though I didn't actually get the hang of stopping the continuous vertical scroll until just tonight (about two weeks after purchase).  Turns out you can simply rest your thumb on the pad during a scroll and the scroll stops.  I kept pressing the pad to stop it, which not only stopped the scrolling but instantly caused a selection to be made (whatever you ended up stopping on), then I switched to tapping the pad to get the scroll to stop, which didn't always work.

Feedback:

1) Agree with other posters about sketchy left-right navigation.  Most of the time it works, but I do find myself having to repeat my left-right swipes much more frequently than the up-down swipes.

2) I would like to see horizontal scrolling through long lists work the same way that vertical scrolling works (esp. scrolling horizontally through albums).  I am not a fan of the one-at-a-time horizontal scrolling.

3) Also agree with adding a tap or double-tap as a way of making a selection.

4) Where can I provide feedback on the Back and Play/Pause buttons?  Is there a thread on those?  Mine occasionally stick beneath the housing and stay depressed when I press them.  The problem is worse with the Back button.  I don't feel like I'm using a lot of force when I press the buttons.

 

tapping or double tapping to make a selection would be very nice.  it would remove the need for clicking for touch enthusiasts like me. If this feature was added, i would never click, except to fast forward/rewind. 

Also, For music, podcasts, and video, i'd love to see an iPod-like feature where you click, and swipe to go to wherever you want to in the song/video/podcasts, then click again to go to that point. 

At first I didn't like the touch part of it so I turned it off.. It also confused my friends a LOT! I guess it may because i'm one of the few that have a Zune (I live in Canada).. But I turned it back on, and I use it a lot! I like it a lot now.. My friends still just use the up down, left right, etc.. I find the Zune pad in the cold doesnt really perform the way I want it..  It confused a lot of my friends, they instantly tried doing the "ipod circle motion" you know? But a few got used to it..

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"radjer, your tastes in music remind me of an old old fern found fossilized in a rock found in iceland" -MuteByChoice

My main issues with the squircle are because it is not a 5 button d-pad, it is a touchpad that is one single button, that detects the 'direction' by where it feels a finger at the time.
You can't use gloves with it, even though the directional clicking implies you can.
You can't press it too much on the edge, or with your fingernail because it won't register.

But those can't be helped by a firmware update, and the following can:

I had a Zen Vision M (and still would had the toilet not claimed it, and they don't make it anymore in the 60gb flavor) so I'm used to just have a touchpad up and down, and clicking left and right.
It would be nice, for me, to be able to turn off the left/right swiping touch action and just use the fake clicking action.
This would keep me from accidentally changing songs while my thumb is on the touchpad.


Tapping on the squircle rather than clicking it is another habit I bring from the ZVM, and others have mentioned tapping as well. It would be nice to let us simply tap to select something.


When selecting a picture, or when scrolling around in a zoomed-in picture, you must stairstep around the screen because the touchpad is still locked in only two directions.
It would be much easier to use at these two screens, and much more natural, to allow us full 2d motion with the touchpad, more like a normal laptop touchpad.
Again, I'm only talking about those two screens.

This thread will actually help me a lot as I did not know that the pad was a single button that senses where your finger is. The only two real issues I had were undetected clicks (finger being too far off the pad) and accidentally moving down (finger too low on the pad).

Overall I have found the Zune pad very inuitive and easy to learn with little to no training.

If you didnt have to physically click the pad to select a song and all you had to do was tap it, then i would be a very happy zuner

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I dont deal with stupidity. Take your problems elsewhere.

I'm going to echo the sentiment about the tap = middle click.  It'd just feel more natural.

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A simple question kid; Are you with me or not at all? - Sleeping with Giants (The Academy Is...)