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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."
I think they should just develop voice recognition for phones and do away with the keypad for SMS messages. Then again phones already work on a voice recognition basis - it's called calling someone!
Video Game cheats, hints a
Urm yah. The link. (Flash required)
My life is one big siesta in which I'm dreaming I wished my life was one big siesta.
So this first appeared on Japanese phones. That means on another 10 years it well be the new 'latest development cutting edge' in North America's cellphone technology.
I live in North America and I still don't have WAP or SMS on my phone ... I have to settle for a proprietary browser and text system.
NOKIA, for example, has dictionaries in the newer mobile phones.
Meaning, you just press each "number" just once, even if the "letter" is the last one under this "number." The dictionary does the guessing and writes the right word.
Besides, it words as an automatic spellchecker!!! No need to be ashamed your messages now. No one's going to laugh at your bad grammar.
This is a great idea, I can really see it working BUT the method of entering numbers does sound a tad dodgy:
"Numbers are typed by pressing the four letter keys surrounding each numeral."
Surely sensing pressure centred on the actual number buttons themselves would make more sense?
Otherwise, though, great idea, even beats the Treo.
Every now and then, somebody breaks through with an idea that really changes how we think about things. Fastap is certainly one.
The best part about this design is that none of us will need to relearn anything. It's easily, almost automatically integratable into our daily lives without having to change our behavior. Certainly this doesn't mean we'll all have one soon. We should, but if we don't, I'll be forever disappointed knowing it existed.
BTW, wouldn't this concept also work on a PDA virtual keyboard? Seems like somebody could program one for my Palm without too much trouble. Any takers?
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
I don't know whether there are actually any mobiles that use it, but that's just because I am one of the few backward people who don't have one. ;-)
See EXideas' website for details.
If you're interested in using a mobile messagingto to actually do significant work, where a mistake can cost time, money, inconvenience, hurt feelings, etc, then I suspect you'd prefer to use something PDA-sized which either has room for a real keyboard or allows you to use a stylus & touchscreen to tap out a message.
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.]
Geeks who are still using so-called "multi-tap" input should be ashamed of themselves. Dictionary based methods, T9 (from Tegic/AOL), and iTap (Motorola's equivalent) have been standard on phones for a couple of years now, even if they do have their short-comings.
If you're not into the legacy layout* you could go with MessagEase or this new thing, but the smart money is on a company called Eatoni, since they have two products (LetterWise and WordWise) which they back up with a big stack of research. There's also Zi Corp. who make eZiText and eZiTap for SMS input.
If you're interested in the HCI aspect of all this you could do worse than looking at the work of I Scott Mackenzie, Poika Isokoski or Mark Dunlop.
* 1-800-GOFEDEX anyone? Probably explains why Europe is ahead of the US in this field. That and our ridiculous txt addctn...
Anyway, a summary, if you are interested, is that of the solutions proposed so far, most of them fall into a few categories:
Chorded keyboards: Think microwriter here, or a court reporter's typewriter. The idea is that you get around the small space available for keys by having a group of keys select each character; The microwriter only had four keys for the whole alphabet. The speed of input achievable is quite fast, but the interface is far from easy to learn.
Full key boards: Usually the complaint is that having all of the keys on one small device is no good for anyone with adult sized fingers.
Soft, or stylus input: This is just a touchscreen solution. You can either use a stylus - which is probably not convenient for a phone, or your fingers, where you are back to the problem of dealing with small or not enough keys.
Reduced keyboards: Where you use some method other than chording to input characters on a keyboard with fewer keys than letters in the alphabet(e.g. T9, multi-tap...)
This new device seems to fit in somewhere between a full keyboard and a chorded keyboard. The novel solution here is that you can fit a full keyboard on by using easy-to-learn chording to signify numbers.
See Nokia 5510, it has a largeish split keyboard. Haven't tried it, but I'd imagine it's at least some good.
/. would really be cool, you could read all new things on your cell phone (with GPRS of course). The WAP/HTTP gateways don't seem to convert large html pages to wml very well.
And of course, the Communicator has a normal QWERTY keyboard.
Other Nokia (and most other makers too) have a predictive system. In my 6310i, it seems to work pretty well, although it's not very useful where you need it most often, inputting text in WAP pages. For example, it can't predict your usernames or passwords for wap sites very well...
Not that I ever send SMSs. Well, maybe one or two per cell phone I've owned, just to see how it works.
BTW, WAP version of
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.
Why, 1-800 CALL-ATT of course!
Dial down the center; it's free for you and cheap for them!
Also, then we'd never see any more Carrot Top commercials--wait, that might be a good thing.
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.
Speaking of cool keyboards, how bout those virtual keyboards on zdnet and elsewhere. They project keyboards on any surface and use cameras to sense where your fingers are. Msn story with a photo. Different model at ananova. I know there's no tactile feedback, but think of the compactness.
For those who don't like the alphabetical layout here, think about where QWERTY came from and that this is supposed to replace cell phone keyboards which are already alphabetical, and not computer keyboards.
How can they make a QWERTY keyboard when there's only five keys across? It'd just be a QWERT.
Anyway, since there are only 5 keys across, I doubt the QWERTY arrangement will help any, as the keys will be in different places anyway.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Ahhhh. Same thing earlier designers (such as those on the early Sharp Wizards) thought. Then studies were done and it was found that due to the breaks in the sequence (not all on one line) people unfamiliar with either layout were slowed by the alphabetical layout just as much as for the QWERTY ones). Then also that the slowdown goes away once the layout was learned. So there are no real benefit from going alphabetical aside from some following incorrect intuition.
It slowed down those who knew QWERTY, and made no difference to those who didn't
Keyboards designed in the 80s? What are you on about. The QWERTY keyboard was developed in the 1860s not the 1980s, and it was a competing system to the Dvorak keyboard. Both were to slow down typists to stop the keys jamming on typewriters.
Get a clue.
Whoa. If you're going to correct someone, at least get your facts straight. Dvorak wasn't created until the 1920s/1930s. The Dvorak was created to increase typing speed, rather than to decrease it, by putting the most commonly used letters on the home row. I forget the exact number, but It's something over 80% of the letters typed in a normal English text would be on the home row.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
Dvorak was still required to slow the typist dow - but it was thought that QWERTY wasn't the best way of doing it. I didn't say anything about when Dvorak was developed. And QWERTY certainly wasn't developed in the 1980s.....
Typically, in european languages, the new letters would be accented and diacriticated (is that a word?) versions of the normal letters. So T9 technology would help finding the correct version of the letter with the help of a dictionary. I imagine this would help non-latin alphabets as well, such as hebrew, cyrillic, etc...
Also, it will reduce the number of guesses T9 would have to do. For short words, there are often several candidates, where each letter can be one of three letters (or more). So you have to scroll through a list to find the correct one. If your input is more accurate to begin with, the list of candidate words will be shorter.
DOVARK? I guess you mean dvorak? It was designed for typewriters as well. (although it is newer, and has been quite succesfull at creating a myth of it's superiority, despite the lack of any good scientific studies to back this claim).