Sometimes, there’s a disconnect on the device itself.

So the phone rings and I pick up our new Sony Ericsson W810i. We bought it for testing so i’ve never actually heard it ring or picked up a call.

Being a Nokia Series 60 junkie I look for the Green ‘answer’ button but can’t find it so start hunting around for Sony’s version. My choices are…

• what looks like two regular soft-keys (positioned left and right—directly under the screen with a non-descript ‘line’ icon on them)
• a key with an icon that looks suspiciously like the Wikipedia ‘external hyperlink’ icon,
• a key with an arrow pointing backwards,
• a key with a very small thing that looks like a pixel-font letter ‘c’
• oh—and a bright red one with the squiggly walkman symbol on it

So i’m a bit stumped and Bryan yells out “it’s the one that says ‘answer call’ on it!”

Huh? What? Hmm…ok, now I see it.

Call me a newbie but the last thing that occurred to me when he said that, was that the button that “says answer call’ was actually a button mapped to ‘answer call’ displayed on screen.

So this kinda contradicts the observations in my previous post—or does it? When does what’s on-screen map intuitively to the handset keys, and when doesn’t it?

Does it depend on the situation you’re in and the task you’re trying to accomplish (are certain tasks percieved as device-based tasks vs display-based tasks?)