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One-Thumb Keyboard
pagercam2 writes "As Japanese teens are so used to typing one another messages on their cellphones, they are now more comfortable with one thumb typing than the old two handed QWERTY. So a Japanese company has come out with a
one-thumb keypad
that allows a user to enter alphanumberic text and control the mouse with only one thumb. Sort of a cross between a TV remote and a phone keypad, with a USB connection, although wireless seems to be an obvious next step. Maybe not a revolution for the desktop, but this could advance data input on handhelds." Pictures transcend language barriers.
[insert one handed typing joke here]
Only in japan...
Banaaaana!
Gives a wholly new meaning to "thumbs up" or "all thumbs"...
It'll make porn surfing a lot easier.
Just a guy with an opinion
Now those shortened abbreviations for everyday common words is going to become more widespread. 2 L8 - U WILL B ASSIM8D!
alphanumberic
And this is the type of output you get when you only type with your thumbs.
This means that I'm going to drink even more coffee.
so if a user types "my nose" in AIM, they've thumbed their nose at you? :]
as long as it has a usb connection, I'm sure I've seen a usb powered coffee warmer and I'm pretty sure I didn't dream up that usb ladies pleasure accesorry.
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:diELL1OoJQwJ: www.mevael.co.jp/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
I wounder if they have considered marketing this to the handicaps.. I know a few people who have lost a hand or two in one way or another and they have often found it difficult to use a regular reybaord.. I known one guy who simply won't use a computer now and one other who simply uses a mouse with a on screen keyboard.. not as quick, but he says its more conformatable.
Over the next few hundred millenia, expect the fingers and left thumb to wither and disappear, while the right thumb advances in dexterity, utlimately develops it's own intelligence, detaches from the human "host", and finally becomes the dominant species on the planet.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
As Japanese teens are so used to typing one another messages on their cellphones, they are now more comfortable with one thumb typing than the old two handed QWERTY.
Bull. Shit. While I don't doubt the increased popularity of cell phones has led many to grow accustomed to typing in this manner, this is a ridiculous and untrue claim.
Males, anyhow, can use another appendage that is at least mildly opposable with this keyboard. This would allow your hands to remain free to, say, conduct an orchestra or do pull-ups....all while chatting with your friends!!! Incredible!!!
Google Cache
...Send this to 3DRealms, so they can speed up production on Duke Nukem Forever.
Its the toaster clock of tomorrow! Really, who thinks up this crap.
says, "Aaaaaayyyyy"
Automatics are for old men
Although they didn't say much more about it...
Wired blurb
So what do I do with my other hand when I'm surfing the Internet?
Oh - wait. Um, nevermind.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Seriously... that can't be good for your hands.
A one thumb keyboard doesn't do a lot of good in Windows. You'll at least need this:
http://www.sadinoff.com/fun/kbd.jpg
I would bet on voice recognition or blackberry-style data input for handhelds before I bet on thumb-only input.
[aside]It kind of reminds me of those old Colecovision controllers....[/aside]
Peter Griffin: Am..Am I supposed to conduct with my penis?
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
A few years ago I had DeQuervain's Tenosynovitis which was terribly painful problems with my thumbs. Sort of like carpal tunnel I guess. Anyhow some therapy and an ergonomic keyboard suggestion from a friend (thanks Nugget!) saved me from surgery.
Using a thumb that much will cause problems..
Trolling is a art,
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
And this will coincidentally be available at ThinkGeek when?
"Slashdot is about legos and staplers." -Cmdr. Taco
needs thumbs?
...without an opposable thumb?
"One-handed" web surfers will no longer have to remember all those complicated alt-ascii codes and work with those page flippers. Plus, I hear that if you type with the other hand, it feels like someone else is doing it :)
but I don't have a thumb you insensitive clod!... oh hold on..
possibly for the disabled [MD or the like] or those of us who have painful carpal tunnel syndrome.
"Life is great; without it, you'd be dead." -Harmony Korine
Keiboard? Did they send this out with a typo like this? Did anyone read that? Damn, those Japanese are some lazy people...
We're only gonna die from our own arrogance, that's why we might as well take our time...
I have one of these in my house, I call it the "TV remote control"
While traditional chording keyboards have never really caught on, this thumb "keyboard" seems to have great potential in this area. Chording keyboards, as we all know, have fewer keys and allow people to type faster if they know the combinations very well. Unfortunately, the combinations are somewhat more difficult to memorize than the locations of keys on a regular keyboard. But if you could have a dual-thumb apparatus, like a set of two joysticks or a pair of sensor-embedded gloves (a la Minority Report), I bet you could make chording feasible.
Looks like typing speed will be pretty slow and the poor thumb will get too much of a work out (typing thumb?). I'd be really concerned about the increased chance for repetitive stress injuries for the thumb and palm.
British university researchers, after studying hundreds of children in Beijing, Tokyo and other big cities, say today's youngsters have become the 'thumb generation'.
By regularly using mobile phones, especially to send text messages and by playing hand-held computer games, a physical mutation had developed in the under-25s, the researchers have found.
The thumbs of today's electronic-gadget generation of children have become more muscled, more dextrous and often more used than fingers.
This is because modern youngsters grow up using hand-held gadgets where the devices are cupped in the hand and held firm by fingers, giving thumbs the pivotal role of pushing buttons.
This has caused a significant physical alteration in the way the digits of the hand are used - with thumbs being given the thumbs-up and an increasingly important role in youngsters' lives.
The researchers found that gadget-age children were now using their thumbs for tasks such as pointing at things and ringing doorbells - traditionally the job of the forefinger.
Whereas the forefinger was also previously used to clean an ear opening, mobile-phone using, text-messaging children will instinctively use their thumbs.
Even when they want to pick their noses, more and more boys and girls are tending to use a thumb, instead of a finger.
Whereas mothers and fathers would push the buttons on a telephone with their forefinger, many children would use their thumbs instead.
And when they type a message on the keyboard of a desktop computer, children hit more keys with their thumbs than adults.
Though most older people use their forefingers to operate remote controls for television sets and video recorders, many children tend to use their thumbs.
The findings have been revealed by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit of Warwick University, one of Britain's top research institutions.
Experts spent six months studying the habits of thousands of children in countries around the world.
The researchers included youngsters in Beijing and Tokyo in their survey, in order to ensure that their findings were globally relevant, and did not apply to just a couple of countries.
The experts found that in fact, the trend of children using their thumbs more and more was particularly marked in Japan.
yes tyng wth 1 hand seens t be a great dea!
The article displays only a cellphone and some incomprehensible japanese text. Nothing else to see, so move on.
Finally my other hand is free to do *ahem* other things :D
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
I never understood that, especially since I knew a guy who could make a clapping sound with just one hand (and only one hand, you sickos)
What is the market for this... really. Not mobile phone users as anyone who uses SMS with predictive text is pretty swift on a small keypad, and women aged 15-30 appear to be able to type at 100wpm.
Really in Japan and Europe the SMS speed people get is gobsmacking and technologies like predictive text are probably more effective than keyboard design especially as the software improves.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
This just looks like the kind of alphanumeric pad you get on cellphones, just on a wired USB dongle.
You can already get IR remote controls with these built in!
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
PrairieNights
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
Huh?
"Developed" a mutation?
Pleased to meet you, Mr. Lamarck.
we see somebody on the highway writing email with one hand, eating with the other hand, and using their shoulder to hold onto a cell phone and using their feet to steer?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yeah these japanese teens might do some IMing and write a few essays, but how about cutting some serious Atari 2600 BASIC code with a numeric keypad (circa 1978).
How am I supposed to type ctrl alt del when using Windows now.
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1.5" monitors. As Japanese teens are so used to reading messages on their cellphones, they are now more comfortable with monitors closer to the size of their cellphone screen which...
It would seem like this would go over better if it were cordless, much like a tv remote control. If you look at the pictures, it looks corded, this decreases the utility for me, if I have to be that close to the computer, I might as well use my regular corded keyboard and mouse.
If you are over 30, don't even think about thumb wrestling with a 10 year old. You'll get you ass kicked.
I guess another application is that this keyboard allows you to easily type while the other hand is occupied ;-)
-psy
Can anyone perchance tell me why the colors in the pictures are in katakana?
I have been looking for a remote control that incorporates an SMS type thumb keyboard and a pointing device (mini trackball?). I've seen one with a trackball and a slew of buttons, but no keyboard.
Living room computers really need something like this. Buttons are great, but for typing a URL, you need a keyboard.
Yaaaay for over-seas slashdotting!
no comment
mod him down -- as a japanese nisei i'm offended. >:(
...the gadget-hype not withstanding, in Japanese they don't have an alphabet in the same way as we do in the Western world. I imagine they must "build" symbols in a way, which makes as much or little sense on a one-hand as a two-hand keyboard really.
Personally I'd find this very awkward because I'm used to a one press = one character keyboard, and even on my cell phone it is mostly so because of the dictionary, despite some characters "sharing" a button.
But, I suppose it would work for some of the people I went to school with that in (the US equivalent of) high school managed a whopping 50 CPM (yes, that's characters per minute)...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ok...I'm in a room, and OH CRAP, someone tracked the buffest mob in the entire friggen game....Gotta get that thumb moving...by the time I get to fully type recall with my thumb, the monster has proceeded to kill me, eat my corpse, and sacrifice all of the equipment on it...and I just completed getting all that L33t eq!!
For some things, there will always be your handy-dandy QWERTY keyboard.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
It bugs me to no end when someone posts something and doesn't cite a source. Posts like that shouldn't get modded up, period!!!
0 20325_001.html
http://it.asia1.com.sg/specials/phones/thumbgen20
There's the link.
This site features a goos system for one handed data imput. It makes more sense to me than the pictures from the japanese sight did anyway.
did you ever think though that each character in their language is a word?
Microsoft using its monopoly powers to screw over school districts some more.
Japan gets fun toys every day of the week, like keypads (yay for pr0n right on the shelf @ 7-11!!!), while the greed of the power elite in this country destroys the domestic situation, stifles innovation, and in the school case, retards the possibility for children to get a non-vendor locked, broadbased view of information technology.
America the great.? America the gutter..
Microsoft to fuck over schools some more
>this could advance data input on handhelds Already available for Palm in Japan. http://www.holonsoft.co.jp/products/palm/wootte/
OH man, this is a bad idea. Touch-typing, no matter how much experience you have with those damned numberpads, is ALWAYS going to be faster. Seriously. get an instructional course in touchtyping, get some skillz built up with 'The Typing of the Dead' and frickin end your damned love-affairs with doing everything like its SMS. You'll be happier in the long run.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
Viathumb.....
It will keep you thumb pumped for hours!!!
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
Unfortunately I can. And already do. It's bad enough that way too many of us who are "computer professionals" have the fun of carpal tunnel and/or tendonitis from using all of our fingers for typing. I can only imagine what the concentrated repetitive motion injury will be for thumb-only typing. Ugh. It already hurts like hell to type on my Blackberry.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
ãSåããfããã
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sulli
RTFJ.
The USB Coffee warmer was a JOKE. I don't remember where I saw it, but it was on April Fool's Day, and it took me a minute or two to realize that. I'd already done the math on how many watts of power at 5 Volts = too many amps to draw from a USB port when I realized it was April 1.
It woudn't surprise me that the "pleasure accessory" item was a joke, too...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Actually, the reason that people can type fast isnt because of the thumb-input, it seems to be from the word completion algorithms in use.
For instance, you hit 2-7 it autofills in the word 'at'. Then as you type in more '3 Letter' keys, it will automatically fill in the most common words. When you are done and its not the word you want, you hit # or * or whatever and loop through all the words in the dictionary. So in the example above, you hit '*' then 'at' becomes 'as' and you keep typing away.
Which isn't even a good example, becuase it took 3 keystrokes for a 2 letter word, while it seems most 5+ words are guessed pretty readily by the completion algorithm.
Also to note, that it is *More* work to type 'L8' than 'Late', since to type L8 you need to use the non-completion input which would be done in 3 key presses to get L, then 4 to get 8. While 'Late' would take 4.
This seems like it would be an almost perfect car mp3 PC controller.
My other first post is car post.
with a USB base to boot.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Just because we have opposing thumbs doesn't mean we should use them in silly ways. Can you imagine writting a term paper using only your thumbs? Spreading the task across 10 fingers/thumbs seems to be easier on the body then putting all the task onto one thumb....
This might be good for mobile phone use but beyond that it seems to be of dubious use. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Yes, maybe. But these keyboards don't have thousands of keys. Either they are using an alphabetic equivalent, or are building the desired character out of component keystrokes.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
slipping away
Slipping Away...
http://babelfish.altavista.com
Whats New:
The new product " Keiboard (the Kay board) it sold. While the Kay board like the portable telephone striking the mail with the one hand, sprawling it is the keyboard for the personal computer which is optimum to to peruse the Web.
Topics:
The new product " Keiboard (the Kay board) it can purchase from this way.
Show:
The new product " Keiboard (the Kay board) it sold. While the Kay board like the portable telephone striking the mail with the one hand, sprawling it is the keyboard for the personal computer which is optimum to to peruse the Web.
The new product " Keiboard (the Kay board) it can purchase from this way.
' Business Shaw TOKYO 2003 ' we ended.
Business Shaw official home page
http://bs.noma.or.jp
In everyone whom attendance it receives gratitude you say
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Seems the only point of all these new great innovations in keyboard technologies is to be "different", none of them seem to be even remotely useful. (Except that keyboard with breasts, that thing was just plain ingenious)
sic transit gloria mundi
10 years from now, on slashdot, a huge article with teachers bemoaning the fact that "touch typing" has gone the way of cursive.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
This invention has the potential to change society !!! Numbers AND letters on the same button, arranged to resemble a telephone dial pad. You would at first think this is insanely stupid and doomed to failure. I mean cmon, numbers and letters on the same button?!?! Needless to say an invention of this calibre should be immediately reported around the globe.
-BMojo
No, it's not a pr0n joke.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Thinkgeek also has a one hand keyboard. Works a bit different though.
"Nobody really checks their email any more. They just delete their spam"
Japanese has a phonetic alphabet as well (two of them, actually).
Speaking of Wireless being the next step... I have been waiting for a wireless twiddler for almost 5 years now. If the made one, I'd buy it.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
http://www.mevael.co.jp/h_images/main_left.jpg
http://www.mevael.co.jp/h_images/main_left.jpg
my first comment on slashdot whee.. anyway if you use it too much, your thumb go faster and rapidly and in that case you probably being affected on remote for TV, and other? it just a thought i give it out of my own mind. heh. anyway, that all for my first comment. wahoo.
I'd like to see 3 buttons on the side for an advanced mode, so you can type quicker. Also maybe have an option to reprogram the keys for different modes.
And if it was cheap enough, I could see this as an addon for a pocket pc.
and these strange input devices?
This space for rent, inquire within.
drivers for linux?
and are they open source?
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
They'll develop special "thumby" guns that the trigger backwards along with the pistol grip, so they can shoot it like a cell phone.
Of course that completly stops people from blastin' caps like a gangsta but that's not a bad thing either.
While we are talking about human-computer interfaces, I might as well mention that I've found an ingenious way to masturbate. If I had this Japanese thumb keyboard I could have used it for chatting. Here's my setup:
* A laptop
* An optical mouse
* A wireless network connection
* A pair of headphones
* Two still-connected pieces of paper towel
* a bed
* a pillow
* Might need a piece of scotch tape
So, get yourself all naked, and shove a bic pen up your butt for added stimulation. Lay the pillow on your bed leaning against the wall. Lay down on the bed with your head propped up with the pillow. Lay the laptop on your chest so that the front is almost under your chin. Since you have an optical mouse, you can use it on the bed sheet. If you have the thumbkeyboard, even better. Put on the headphones. Connect the paper towel to the back of the screen by sticking it on the screen latch or using a bit of scotch tape. The paper towel should be long enough to go down to the base of your cock. Now you can wack it while laying down and with the screen in your face without having to worry about making a mess. It's fucking awesome.
I think I'll be getting myself one of these keyboards.
Devise a language consisting only of the digits 0 - 9 plus pound and asterisk for punctuation. Sounds like a good project for the Trekkies that dress like Klingons. Or Noam Chomsky maybe. [Boy, have I just offended like at least 25% of the slashdot readership, or what?]
Sure, this little gadget might be more stylish, however, you only use one finger to "type", instead of 4. I doubt that you'll be able to type documents using a cellular phone, same for this. For medical use, I would definately recommend the Dvorak right hand or left hand models, for people who have only one functional hand. Here's a link for more information on the 3 Dvorak type keyboards.
Typing speed for "keitai" or ultraportable devices (specifically cell phones) in Japan compares surprisingly well with desktop computing.
The main reason is that... big surprise here now... most of the typing is done in the Japanese language, and not in English. In order to type in Japanese on a QWERTY or other roman-set board, you must generally hit at least two keys per character. So hitting the same phone button two or three times (on average) to produce a character is actually faster than hunting down two separate keys and pushing them in sequence.
Furthermore, just typing the characters in doesn't mean that you're finished. You must use the "henkan" (character transformation) system. Japanese has many ways to write the same character -- for example, there are over 40 different characters for "ha". Sounds like a nightmare, but henkan systems analyze the grammatical functions of the surrounding characters to automatically generate the most likely intended output. The user must then manually touch up any discrepancies. (In related news, the henkan system is being blamed for destroying the writing ability of young Japanese people.)
With this additional overhead, raw keystrokes aren't necessarily the biggest factor in Japanese typing speed. Further, modern keitais make use of auto-completion based on words commonly entered by the user. Reports of speeds over 200 wpm aren't unbelievable when a user can enter many words with only two or three buttons! Incidentally, the average word size in Japanese is two kanji or 4 kana characters.
There is also Japan's miserable history of IT education to consider. A good friend of mine graduated from a pre-business program at her high school which included certification in computing and word processing. She can barely copy and paste. Most of their certification was on "wa-puro" or big word-processing typewriters. Until about 10 years ago, these were the staple in most offices.
Most Japanese people in their mid-20s were introduced to their own cell phone before they had even laid hands on a real computer! To many Japanese people, their keitai is their most personal and important posession. It's only to be expected that we should see advancements here affecting other technologies.
A few other points of interest:
- Japanese people are at home (and able to use their own PC) less than people in most other countries.
- Cell phones can be cheaper than using land-line phones or public phones in Japan... especially when everyone else only uses cell phones!
- Cellular internet, which charges per packet instead of by time, is much more economical for e-mail than dial-up.
- The disaster that is Japanese urban planning, and continuously changing work and social schedules make cell phones a social necessity.
Note that the minimum speed on these puppies is 20 words per minute, and trained ops have hit speeds of over 70 wpm. Sometimes with a ham sandwich in the other fist...
...-.-
same reason we have this SCO scandal! :) LOL
As Japanese teens are so used to typing one another messages on their cellphones, they are now more comfortable with one thumb typing than the old two handed QWERTY. So a Japanese company has come out with a one-thumb keypad that allows a user to enter alphanumberic text and control the mouse with only one thumb.
Translation: They've become adept at a grossly inefficient means of entering data. So, rather than teach them to touch-type efficiently, some numb-nuts company will make a keypad that lets them continue entering data in the same, stupid, one-thumb way.
I used to be really good at arcade video games and often got to enter my initials for high score, so I want a keyboard that has three buttons: Left, right, and fire. That makes just about as much sense.
KEITAI = portable
DENWA = telephone
(most people refer to their "keitai denwa" simply as their "keitai")
So the word "keiboard" is a mix of "keyboard" in the shape of a "keitai"
Just a little Japanese trivia for ya.
My Japanese is rusty, but I believe they said your name is stupid.
The Czech Republic claims the second highest per capita adoption of mobile phones after Finland (at least those were the stats I saw a year ago), and the cost of talking has resulted in SMSing teens being a common site. I've even seen elderly people on the trams texting someone. You can always tell a pro by the fact that they use both thumbs to nimbly type their messages, and that within a few seconds. It is notable that since I broke my Nokia and now have a flashy Sony-Ericsson, my SMS skills have considerably dropped. The new phone has far too slow and less responsive an OS and isn't as suited to texting as my old Nokia. But there is a lot to say for the old two-thumb method I was able to use on that phone. I could have a complete discourse on esoteric subjects with some one on the level of IM, and in the end spend far less money than I would have had I called the person.
Maybe they said ãã®ããfãã (ano wa baka yo), or "that's stupid."
sulli
RTFJ.
After a week of using a keyboard, any sane human can easily type at 10 words per minute. Experienced users can easily do better, even without touch typing. I can type at 40wpm easily, and I don't touch-type. I know touch typists can often type over 80wpm.
What's the best speed for entering words on a phone (assuming you need to write in a literate fashion, not "I NED 2 C U, I CNT RITE ENGLSH NE MORE")? I'm willing to bet it's not even approaching 20 wpm. Predictive text can and should be ignored - it's fine for quick messages, but for any real work it would be so much hassle fixing up the mistakes any speed benefit would be negated.
http://www.exideas.com/ has a nice system for pdas. it's friggin fast.
Not a sentence!
Most japanese people I knew were really slow typists. Consider that they have to slow down every other word or so to select a kanji...I can type about as fast as most japanese in japanese, and I only speak it at about a 3rd grade level. (My speed at everything BUT selecting kanji makes up for it I think)
Anyhow, I can't imagine something like that catching on with people who regularly type in languages that are easier to type, like english.
had to add this. there are 3 distinct writings in japanese. they have their own, original 2 methods which have different characters, but make the same sounds (one is for foreign words, the other is for native words) and then they adopted a TON of chinese characters (one picture = one word) but for the most part, their language is phonetic except for the adopted words from chinese. they are using english now a little more... but still usually translate it into their alphabet (thus slaughtering our words). regardless, their 2 phonetic systems have 46 characters roughly (some letters have fallen out of use over the years). as far as chinese goes anyway, they have adopted a phonetic type system of writing as well to help people read characters they don't know how to pronounce, so they don't need to have thousands upon thousands of keys. if you think about it, that means they can operate with roughly the same number of letters as we do. if you have ever played an older RPG game and you had to "name your character" you would usually be taken to a large screen that was split in half. left side was upper case, right side was lower case. in addition, we would add numbers and odd punctuation marks (anybody ever named their dude $h8R or something??) this is because originally the left side was populated with the hiragana characters (native phonetic language) and the right side used katakana (foreign phonetic language). now you know, and knowing is half the battle...
MessageEase a soft keyboard for PDAs (think Fitaly but better) is designed also to be a full alphanumeric cell-phone keyboard, using the normal 12 buttons. It's well worth a look. Be sure to check out the white paper, which describes the philosophy and compares it with other input methods. Supposedly you can get 30WPM input speeds.
There is also a Yahoo user group with good, fast support from the engineer who created this.
-Karl (not associated with company or product except as a user who was impressed with the white paper and thought this was better than anything else currently out there for input to small devices)
Imagine the millions of geeks able to surf pr0n with two hands on the keyboard in the near future! Or better, yet, don't. It's a rather distressing image.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
The Japenese written language. Half the Americans can't even write in cursive thanks to the keyboard.
What's in a sig?
With an electronic thumb! It's the only way to hitch hike. Provided suitable transportation comes your way in time.
that would be a sound mechanical design if you could hold it steady enough not to break or dislocate the thumb on recoil. I mean, having the trigger and the sear incorporated or connected by a shorter linkage positioned just under the hammer could possibly be a more robust design.
then again IANAGS so I have no idea about making or designing guns.
I think that it's those sexy thumb users getting all the hot dates and then raising five screaming thumbmutants out in the countryside where you can get away from draconian population control laws by proving that you need the kids for agricultural labour.
Hmmm. Maybe John Deere should start making thumb-tractors...
eewwwww! country thumbsex....
You can buy one of those squeeze bulb syringes and fill it with warm salty water to clear out your nasal passages. It's gross but really effective. and it uses your thumbs!
Thumb users will be fine so long as there is enough technology to support their rubber hungry ways.
of one thumb typing?
Batlock...
Since it is not wireless ...
free dom(inion) - free energy - free your mind - whee!
Don't disregard the asymmetric results unbalanced use of hands may have on your physical appearance.
This would be so useful while driving ... since I'm holding the cell phone with the other hand
Maybe everyone in this thread has confused 'ano', which takes a noun after it, with 'are', which doesn't. In any case, 'sore' would have been better.
Whenever I hear/read American anime bunnies trying to speak Japanese, I feel ill. But then I hear a few arrogant twit Japanese fashion victims trying to speak English, and suddenly the anime bunnies don't sound so bad.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
And in about 7.2 seconds there will be a Hello Kitty face on it too...
There's actually a girl in my class who types faster on her cell phone than with a keyboard. Wonder if it includes a T9 dictionary or something like that, otherwise it'd be pretty useless...
I use my cell all the time to send message, and am comfortable with it, but there is no way I'm ever going to give up a real keyboard to a numberpad! It is simply impossible to type as fast when you have to hit the same key 3 times to produce the letter you want (or more if you use accented characters, or punctuation...) My PDA recognised handwriting, and I can scribble notes into it quickly as well, but even that, I'm not sure I want to use over a keyboard.
The Fastap Keyboard is still the best mobile keyboard I've seen to date, in that it fixes the problem of having to hit a number key repeatedly to get a letter, and is accurate even when typing with one fat finger. I've decided that I'm not buying a new mobile device (phone or PDA) until someone comes out with one that uses this keyboard.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
It's been a while since I've been in Japan. My bad.
sulli
RTFJ.
Try out Frogpad www.frogpad.com. I can type at 40 words per minute with mine with one hand and it only took a few hours of training. It blows the hell out of those thumpads. I don't know what those guys in Japan are thinking.
English spelling is NOT random. It may not all follow one pattern, but very few words do not follow A pattern among A group of words. It's complex, sure, but if you can make a guess at where a word came from, and you know under what conditions a vowel will make which sound, you can be almost certain to spell a word correctly. It isn't as simple as the "long vowel short vowel silent vowel" stuff I got in 2nd grade (if it were, people would be able to spell) but it is NOT hard.
English IS phonetic, by way of a complex system of heuristics.