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Alphanumeric Phone Keypad - Fastap
seldo writes "The illustrious BBC has a story about a new mobile phone keypad, designed by a company called Digit Wireless, headed by one Mr David Levy, who "was head of ergonomic design at Apple for five years and was influential in the layout of its Powerbook laptops," according to the article. I don't know how it is to use, but it looks really funky. There's a demo on the site (javascript popup, so no link). The sooner I don't have to deal with the stupid 3-letters-per-button interface to send SMS, the better."
The dictionaries you are mentioning use T9 technology, which is not all that new. I always keep my T9 on because yes it speeds up your typing.
Yet the issue at hand here is to totally scrap the need of a dictionary. SMS Texting is mostly popular in Japan and in Europe although its already picking up in the States. Now the problem here is language. I am Maltese, and we usually tend to use Maltese and English interchangably. Yet you can't do this for texting, because the lack of a Maltese dictionary. Also, you tend to use bad gramemr because typing out certain words STILL requires a look up in the dictionary because there would be more common words with the same combination of letters. People who send loads of SMSes would understand me.
I am totally in favour of encouraging this button layout, so that you don't get to teach your phone your common jargon words. You notice this most when you send messages from someone elses phone. Apart from having to re-learn his/her interface for using T9, you end up discovering that he/she doesn't have the same words. Grrrrrrrr
my 2c
Dodge this !! --Trinity, The Matrix
According to researchers at the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab, voice-recognition will never play an important part in our interaction with Information Technology because we construct our spoken communication in the "short-term" part of our memory.
This recent /. thread, discusses a Washington Post article, "A Visual Rather Than a Verbal Future", which details their work.
But wouldn't it be the same for the new "keyboard"?
Besides, the dictionary thingie is quite handy. I have to write in Spanish about half of the time. And I'm not exactly Spanish. So it helps me a lot. Although at times it messes up with the "accents." [The future (or first person) is sometimes unknowns for the dictionary.]
When I saw the layout, the first thing I thought about was the abcdef-type text input on TI calulators. I spent a lot of time in school putting _notes_ into my TI, and could never get used to the non-qwerty layout. I would not consider this as a time saver for myself.
They should add a button to raise and lower the letter keys so you get the option of bringing them up for use, or recessing them when not needed.
Actually, that article is inaccurate.
It states that their "salesmen used this slight bit of subterfuge to impress potential customers"... However it failed to get into the typewriter "shoot-outs" that went on during that period, where manufacturers would pit their machines against each other in speed trials. QUERTY came to domminance in those. They world's first and fastest touch-typist also came from the Remingtons' machine promotions. (Look up Frank McGurrin sometime if you care).
It also cites Navy experiments on the Dvorak layout. However... they forgot to mention that it was only one study, compared 14 Dvorak typists to 18 QWERTY typists, and that the experiments were conducted by one Lieutenant-Commander August Dvorak, the navy's top time-and-motion man, and owner of the Dvorak layout patent.
For more (but slightly slanted against Dvorak) see "The Fable of the Keys"
(Note that I'm not saying here that Dvorak just the same as QUERTY, but just that QWERTY is much better than some give credit for, and that Dvorak isn't that vastly ahead).