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Single-handed, Offline, Portable Data Input?
One Armed Bandit asks: "By now everyone knows the available single handed keyboard alternatives. What I've not seen available is a true portable one-handed offline input device. Gary Friedman's final concept for the DataEgg is a fantastic one. Unfortunately, it never made it to the market. I - for one - would pay a premium for this kind of device. I think one of the reasons that this hasn't been built is because of the requirement for users to learn a new input mechanism. In my experience, this is a more difficult perception to overcome than a skill to acquire. How many of you can navigate your various electronic devices by touch? Is anything on the market? Does anyone have a pet project?"
"The high points would be:
- Single handed operation (probably chorded)
- Local file storage
- On-board display for visual feedback and document review
- Uplink to host (USB, IR, Wireless)
Even in a noisy environment, you can take audible notes if you have a nose cancelling headset. With the exception of car horns, the traffic can't be heard. However, you also look like a homeless person jabbering to invisible people even more than the usual headphone+cell phone geek, because the normal cell phone pattern of speaking goes away. Nothing like randomly beginning to speak into the air to freak the locals out...
Sig under construction since 1998.
I remember from the early days of microcomputers, when real programmers used toggle switches and keyboards were outrageously expensive, there was a one-handed ASCII keyboard. It was a sphere with four finger buttons and eight thumb buttons. One was supposed to play a chord with the fingers, giving eight bits, and then press one of the thumb buttons, giving three more. It was attractive to a lot of people because the small number of moving parts made it cheap. You might be able to find one used. It would take a lot of training to use, and it might be very hard to get any amount of speed, but it's worth investigating.
There was a commercially-produced keyboard of this form, known as the MicroWriter. It was - probably still is - quite popular among blind/disabled/special-needs users, though that was not its primary market.
First incarnation was a hand-sized device with 6 keys (only the thumb had to move) with about 8K of RAM and an 1802 processor. It was intended for use as a portable word-processor. The same mechanics and case were used as an auxiliary keyboard for the BBC Micro (using a resistor network on the switches, fed to an analogue input port on the micro).
when i'm around the house, listening to the radio away from my machine and i hear a song i like, i take out my mobile phone, use the shortcut to load a text editor, tap the song name in using t9 predictive text input, and hit 'send via bluetooth' and it's on my machine for when i return.
you can operate it single handedly, it has local file storage, a display and can trasmit data via bluetooth or irda or even email if you want to pay.
it can also act as a telecommunications device. modern phones like the siemens s55 also act as dictation machines should you get the oppotunity to speak.
Another chorded one-handed input device, like we didn't have enough of them already.
What would be nice to have would be a chorded one-handed keyboard with Bluetooth. A small display would then go into the glasses or into a wrist watch. That's a much more convenient arrangement than putting everything into a single "data egg" (with a proprietary and patented layout to boot).
What about a mobile phone, especially 1 with T9 text input?