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Death of the Cell Phone Keypad As We Know It?
An anonymous reader writes, "According to a CNet article, two companies called Mobience and Nuance have created viable and possibly better alternatives to the standard cell phone keypad. 'Mobience, which is based in South Korea, has redesigned the ABC and Qwerty key layout, and come up with MobileQwerty. It's essentially the same three-letters-per-key system as the standard mobile keypad layout, but the letters have been rearranged in a Qwertyesque way to increase efficiency.' The other system developed by Nuance is a mobile speech platform that turns speech into text and replaces the keypad altogether. I was skeptical at first but the video of Nuance's software vs. Ben Cook, the ex world texting champion, is undeniably impressive."
So they've also been set up to avoid jamming?
Isn't the point of text messaging typically to say something you wouldn't want to say out loud? Nobody cares if you type something provocative, but if you say it while sitting there bored in a meeting, you're probably hosed. I'm not insinuating that the technology is a bad idea, I think it's really cool (particularly if it works better than most voice recognition software), but I don't see it contributing to the "Death of the Cell Phone Keypad as we know it".
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QUERTY was originally designed not to increase typing efficiency--in fact, the opposite is true. Typists were getting so fast with ABCDE layouts that the keys were jamming. QUERTY was designed in part to slow typists down.
The article should have called it "Dvorakesque" instead.
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It's funny how so many of these things die but still stick around...
You know, so many iPod killers out there, they should be dead by now right? And CDs... they're dead too and the MP3s did it, right? Even DVDs, HD and BluRay are killing them as well. It's only a matter of time. Oh and DAPs are dying too. They'll be replaced by cell phones.
What else is dying and will never actually go away?
The QWERTY keyboard layout is actually designed to decrease efficiency. This was so old typewriters wouldn't jam from being typed on too fast (this was before the days of people trying for first post). Hopefully they have done differently with their new layout (unless the flood of text messages is overwhelming the system, then it might be helpful to slow them down a bit).
Let's see, we got cell phones so we could talk. Then the cool idea of texting (yawn). And now, a mobile phone that let's you talk into it, and convert that to text to send a text message? Wow!
I'm holding out for the phone that translates my voice directly into voice the other party can hear. Sigh
I know my parents would love to say goodbye to the keypad. All the cellphones these days are just too small, the buttons too small (and what about people with really big fingers?) I tried finding them a cellphone with extra-large keys but gave up and bought them a motorola unit that they can kind of read but it's difficult without their reading glasses. Screw voice technology, just give me a cellphone with big digits on it... they know how to use a phone, no fancy voice activation stuff that will probably just confuse them anyways.
My thumb hurts. My eyes burn. My brain aches.
Looks like men now must make a choice. Texting or masturbation. No man will be able to coordinate both with keypads like this.
Sugapablo
You must have only read the top half of the article. Please read the bottom half as well.
I hear Dvorak keyboards are more efficient. But I don't use one. Why? I already have the qwerty keypad memorized. Not only would I have to learn the Dvorak layout, but I'd have to somehow forget the qwerty one.
So yeah, this might be a great idea - if you've never used a keypad before.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
However it won't catch on because everybody's used to the ABC layout, and somebody's already come up with T9 which works well enough for most people for entering large amounts of text instead of numbers.
If it were otherwise, computer keyboards would be Dvorak instead of Qwerty.
Well duh, that's just stupid. Yes, speaking might be quicker than texting but if I'm somewhere I can text using speech recognition I might as well pick up the phone and talk.
-b.
The texting champion seems to be using multiple keypresses per letter. Does anyone seriously do this anymore? I can type using predictive text about as fast as I can type at a querty keyboard. Occasionally you have to flick to a different word (but you quickly learn which common ones collide and the extra keypress becomes part of the muscle memory for the word), but on the other hand there are far few keys which is a big advantage. Admittedly I'm not a proper touch typist, but I do use all my fingers, so it's hardly slow...
Anyway, the comparison seems a bit bogus to me as we already have a system many times faster than the one they are comparing to.
MP
From what I've seen from the QWERTY links, the keypad stays very much alive. The key mappings are what change. And it seems to me that the cases in which you are likely to use text messaging are not generally cases where efficiency is essential.
-b.
You're right. And let me add: how are you supposed to cheat in an exam with such a speech to text mechanism?
In a practical situation, however, most mobile phone and voice-recognition users would agree that having to speak into your phone isn't always ideal or even possible.
It shows just how different the idea of the "telephone" is from a decade ago.
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They missed the European Union's EUROPHON-1 Standard (pronounced "euro phoney") out. This is clearly a case of the European Union gone mad. ;)
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Nuance creates Dragon Naturally Speaking, and version 9 is the best so far. Yeah, it's not great for programming, but it gives my hands a break for IMs and E-Mails, as well as has a speech-to-text for MP3's from my voice recorder(yes, not a big feature for most people, but it is for me). 8 was good, but you had to train it, I've barely had to correct 9 at all.
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You spelled txt'ng wrong....
Fucking SMS.
Also, wtf. Text-to-speech for text messaging? Does anyone else see how inane this is? IT'S A PHONE, JUST CALL THEM.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
as insightful... I agree...
on the one hand you have a new layout for the keypad that matches qwerty--qwerty works because you have 4 fingers and two thumbs available... for a keypad it might be a bit better, but what does it really gain?
the other is speach to text... which completely stupid as a 100% replacement for a keypad because 100% of what I type in SMS' I don't want to say out loud, that's why I'm not calling.
I know that not every one will agree but I think Morse code might be a good choice.
I recently spent a little time learning the letters and it was surprisingly easy.
I think it would make a really good text entry method for a lot of mobile applications.
What does every one think of this?
I'm guessing you haven't been around any European teenagers lately. Frankly, they make the 308 presses/67 seconds record listed in the ad seem a bit low :p
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Being how I type on a Dvorak keyboard at home, I love the idea of a 'better' layout. Assuming, of course, that it is in fact better.
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Why would a qwerty layout on a 10 digit keypad be more efficient than some other layout? They seem to be assuming that the knowledge a user has to use a qwerty layout on a traditional keypad would translate easily to the 10 digit layout. I'm not so sure that's how it works (and I was a Cognitive Science major).
I assume it's for the situations when YOU can talk, but the receiving party can't (and they also can't check voicemail). But then, I never use text messages, so I woulnd't know.
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From Mobience page (SWF):
So don't plan on seeing anything like this in the Free world for 20 years.
http://www.blackberry.com/products/suretype/index. shtml
o writer.htm
(OK - that has with 5 keys across rather than 3)
It's not a perfect solution - a number of 3 letter combinations have multiple words that they can mean. Actually, what I'd rather have is something like the old Microwriter Agenda:
http://www.geoff.org.uk.nyud.net:8080/museum/micr
but without the individual character ABCDE etc. keys.
Is the qwerty layout actually any better? Come 10 years time when the mobile phone kids are all grown up, this won't even be a discussion. Just like qwerty efficiency is also related to how used you are to the key pad, kids of today can type at speed equalling that of most typers, so is the problem really with the layout?
Why not just make the phone screen a touchscreen and introduce a graffiti-like writing system? I, for one, would find that faster. The 9 (or 12) button keypad is flawed - it will never be as good as a separate button for every key, whatever way you choose to jam letters into it.
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Servus,
why don't they simply build a keypad with the standard 4x3 layout and make the keys seamless. Then you could push "between" the keys effectively pressing 2 or 4 keys at the same time. This would give you a lot more "virtual keys". If the keys are arranged in a sensible way (and not in the braindead current SMS-Way), you might get a great advance in typing speed.
Next, take a large amount of text messages. Start simulating many (random) keypad layouts and take the weekend off. Next monday: voila, your most efficient keypad.
And no, it won't be qwerty. It will probably roughly resemble the ATOMIK keyboard layout for stylus-based systems.
-JAB
It's not much of a stretch to see that it'd be handy for standard email messaging, instant messaging, note taking, and sending SMSs to multiple recipients. All of these are possible on today's phones.
There are obviously more applications for this than cheating on tests and discreetly texting your girlfri... cheating on tests.
Yes, it is now more of a communication device, and can handle different type of communications, from text, voice, data, fax, email and video. Of course, some people handle change better than others, and some are still amazed. I mean the name is different, mobile phone and telephone, but don't let that stop you from getting excited.
Use Dvorak at work on a slow day (enable dvorak and switch over default is left shift + alt when you want to type qwerty), it makes you look like your working as your jabbing away at keys, but your productivity is a lot slower until you get up to speed so your stretching out the work to make it last ;)
i have to agree that dvorak isnt any better for sysadmin stuff, since the letter combos arent usually regular, but this also holds true for qwerty so that kinda balances that one out!
If they realy wanted to make an efficant phone keypad they would put a morse code button on the phone. I don't know morse code but if I had a button where I could type without even looking at the keypad I would learn it and use it.
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If you rearrange the letters and the numbers they correspond with, won't that screw up phone numbers that use text spellings? For example, Comcast's main phone number is 1-800-COMCAST (800-266-2278). If suddenly your keypad has "TUY" mapped to number 2 instead of number 8, that spelling isn't going to work any longer. With "MobileQwerty", 1-800-COMCAST becomes 1-800-739-7472, aka a wrong number. What are they planning on doing, only having the letters arranged differently for sending text messages, and otherwise having the standard ABC configuration for normal dialing? Seems like it would be very confusing.
According to the video, the Nuance phone recognized both the words "Serrasalmus" and "Pygocentrus." That's a bit of a stretch, wouldn't you say? Now, my sms phone doesn't even recognize "bullshit." I do, though.
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What, no Dvorak layout? Is there no love?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
First of all I'd like not to talk while sending an SMS or dialing a number. For the sake of my privacy and politeness.
Second I'd like to see a better device design. Keyboard constraints are due to "standard" designs: brick shaped devices give no alternatives.
Third I'd like to see some more advance in the T9-like technologies: they lack context analysis.
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The texting champion was beat on late-night television by a ham radio operator using Morse code. I know Morse code, and can key it a hell of a lot faster than punching out T9 on a keypad, especially if I'm using IAMBIC paddles (a 2-key arrangement). Give me a cell phone with IAMBIC paddles, and I'll text circles around you.
Until then, voice will do just fine.
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Doesn't predictive text make a "more efficient" layout basically pointless? Yes, once you'd learnt it entering proper nouns and other non-dictionary words would be quicker. But really, just turn predictive text on folks. The pain of the first few days soon gives way to MUCH quicker texting.
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Most people just use the numbers. I only use the letters on my phone when adding a contact. For this reason I prefer a layout in the traditional abc order. I guess if I was sending text messages all day I might think differently, but I prefer to just call somebody if I wish to talk to them using a telephone.
nothing
We're dealing with a series of trade offs
speaking is faster than typing (for most people)
reading is faster than listening (for most people)
Time: speaking vs typing
cost: static connection vs burst transmissions
Talking on a cell phone is really expensive (once you run over your minutes) compared to a text message. At that point, it would be cheaper & faster to use a speech-to-text setup on your cellphone.
The rest of the time, using a speech-to-text setup is merely a choice of conveinence, since it is generally faster than typing it out with your thumb.
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think of DDR (dance dance revolution) when they first looked at their webpage? Immagine dialing your buddy by making some dance moves! Now mouse gestures are to web browsing as dancing is to calling your buddy!
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I thought the whole point of txt messaging was to send a message without interrupting your recipient and to save money instead of making expensive international cell phone calls.
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The correct way to make texting oh-so-hyper-fast would be to put the most used letters as the first letter on the keys, followed by 9 less used, and finally 9 even less used.
QWE makes no sense. Why one lil click to type a Q and three to type an E? I sure know I type a lot more e's than q's. EWQ would be a lot better.
Then, of course, you run into the lil' problem with different languages using certain characters more than others and people using bizarre short hand (Go to new zeeland will ya! (: ) .
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Yeah, it used to be cheap. Now its $0.20/msg (sender & receiver both get charged, or $5-10/mo extra for a text plan) while voice is free (included).
So, from 9pm to 7am or whatever, I could call any number I want for the entire night, every single day (plus all day on weekends) for free and hog a TON of their resources. But its $0.10 to send a single text msg which is a few hundred bytes? Thats insane.
This reminds me of something a student worked on, a project called Glyph for a French university. The idea was to have a keypad with only 7 keys, allowing you to write any letter in only one move. It uses the curves of the letter to identify what you want to type. He led a study on whether it was usable, and has a video of his work on a PDA.
o cs/Glyph2PPC_Demo.wmv, and here is the page where he ran his tests: http://www-valoria.univ-ubs.fr/Mohammed.Belatar/ev al1/ (it might not be up for long, since the test is now over)
o cs/RAPPORT_DEA.pdf
Unfortunately for you (or maybe, fortunately), he only wrote the stuff in French, but it's worth a try. Here is the video : (wmv, yurk) http://www-valoria.univ-ubs.fr/Mohammed.Belatar/d
He wrote a report you can find here (in French, though): http://www-valoria.univ-ubs.fr/Mohammed.Belatar/d
In a practical situation, however, most two-way pager and voice-recognition users would agree that having to speak into your two-way pager isn't always ideal or even possible.
Does that make more sense to you?
Back in the day, mobile phones couldn't send text messages. Now they can.
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These two companies are basically making minor modifications to existing technology and C-Net is trying to pass it off as something revolutionary. These publications are always blowing things out of proportion.
The reason why keyboards and phone keypads haven't changed much in all this time is because it's exceedingly difficult to come up with anything more practical than we have now. Touch screen displays certainly have helped to some extent, but even that is inferior to a keypad. Perhaps there's some kind of simple control device that's gesture based. The only way to successfully replace a keypad is to develop something that utilizes simpler controls but can enter text as quickly as a keyboard would.
To the designers of MobiQWERTY, I pose a question: could you hook me up with your dealer? I want what you're smokin! QWERTY as you may know is the apparently-random keyboard design we use as a standard because it slows down typing which prevented primitive machines called "type writers" from jamming. We still use QWERTY on our digital keyboards because we're a stupid, stupid species. Cell phone don't jam either, folks. That's just your shitty service. MobiQWERTY has rearranged the default alphabetic 3x3x3 mobile phone layout with one vaguely resembling QWERTY, which places commonly-used letters in mathematically rational positions that make no sense at a glance--except that they're like your computer keyboard, which is a bad association to make because it's not like enough. Of course, DVORAK never caught on and that's actually better. This kind of thing makes me mad. Interfaces are bad enough already, folks.
I'd love to see a chording keyboard on a mobile.
More like it shows how limited the concept of voice communication is.
The most powerful aspect of text communication is the sheer number of assumptions you can make.
You don't have to say "Hello", "goodbye" or go through any off-beat pleasantries.
You just say the message and you're done.
You can encapsulate an entire message in one uninterrupted burst - this can eliminate a lot of unnecessary questions, dissemblage, and digressions.
You can abbreviate.
You can send messages which do not require a response.
You can use annotation, subtext, and codetalk to convey information and tone.
And most importantly, you get a lot more privacy from text messages than voice. This is invaluable in situations where talking is frowned upon (meetings, movies, etc) or undesirable (sensitive topics, eavesdroppers.)
All of these provide an enormous advantage over voice. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the only things that should be left to voice communication are conversations involving more than two people, just for logistics - and with the advent of instant chat rooms on phones, that too will disappear.
Looks like the main time saving gained is by putting ETAONIRSH as the first letters on keys. These are by far the most commonly used letters in English. You would need to use different arrangements for each language to get the same level of efficiency.
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Why don't they rearrange the numbers to match the number pad on my keyboard?
There are some Japanese phones like this for example
I guess they are just way ahead of "us".
rt
Any attempts at creating a new standard layout ought to aim for maximum efficiency, not some half-qwerty inspired layout. It should take into account, not only the number of key presses, but the distance between various keys. This may be complicated by balancing one and two handed operation.
One thing is certain though; after you feed your parameters through a genetic algorithm of some sort, you are unlikely to end up with anything resembling a qwerty layout. With a 9x9 keypad, perhaps the
possible improvement is small, I don't know. In any case though, the resemblance indicates that they did not design for maximum efficiency, and that is annoying.
(probably)
my old cell plan had texting for 1 cent a pop, and the price of the call was 3 cents per 6 seconds. me and my wife used to text all the time, so we could pass groceries lists, to-do things, etc. in no circumstances we could convey in 6 seconds the equivalent of 1/2 kbyte of chars.
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I just bought a pair of Blackberry Pearl phones; one for me, and one for my wife. The phone has two additional columns of keys, giving enough room to put two QWERTY letters per key. They have a system similar to T9 called SureType that does predictive input.
From the statistics standpoint, having 3 letters per key gives you a 33% chance of guessing the right letter. Moving to a system with two letters per key increases those odds to 50%.
I used to own a phone with T9, and I can say without hesitation that the SureType system is way, way better than T9. With T9 I was correcting every 5th or 6th word in a sentence, but now I only correct an average of one word per entire message (3 or 4 sentences). Of all the input methods I've tried so far, this system is hands down the best.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Nonono. Text messages are so cellphone companies can nickle and dime your bill...
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Looks like they just scrunched up the QWERTY keys into nine groups and assigned numbers to them. Here, though, are a few things I'd rather they'd considered instead:
...so yeah, there's a lot more to optimising a phone keypad than just scrunching qwerty up into nine keys.
Isn't the point of text messaging typically to say something you wouldn't want to say out loud?
Perhaps for some people. For me, the point is usually to let somebody know something that I don't expect an immediate reply to (e.g. because I'm asking them to make a decision that they'll need to think about before getting back to me, or I'm just notifying them of something they won't actually need to discuss with me).
Chorded keyboards are way more efficient than that! They should integrate a Twiddler with a cell phone. According to Prof. Thad Starner's testimonial on the website, 60 words per minute are entirely possible, and you'll get 10-30 words per minute after only a weekend of practice! I actually recall him telling me about even higher speeds, but I don't want to misquote him...
For comparison, here's some info on normal QWERTY keyboards: "Someone having minor experience with keyboards can reach 20 words per minute, an average typist reaches about 30 to 45 (usually the minimum required for dispatch positions and other typing jobs), while advanced typists work at speeds above 60." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute)
The problem with this keyboard, is that the probabilities given to the letters are probably only for English. So it isn't suited for international standards. Jedyte
And im darn happy with it. It is one of the main reasons i didnt change my cellular since 2002. you feel just at home, while typing sms'es.
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I'd rather have my entire phones face be a touch screen. That way if I've got to write a quick email to someone it would work like this. Let's just say my "personal communicator" dings and the message is regarding some new piece of technology we're talking about deploying and I'd like to white board to understand how they're going to stuff this abomnination into my lab... The message I'd be likely to send is something like "Can we quickly meet to talk about this?".
I'd like to have the option of having some precanned responses. Maybe Crackberries can already do this, I'm not sure. If not I'd press the reply button on the screen a little graphical keyboard would pop up. I'd press the letter C and something nice would happen... since my primary language is English (I know, it's hard to tell from this post...) what I'd like to see is the keyboard shrink down and I'd be presented with a larger "A" "H" and possibly even the word "Can" that I could then press. Then I'd be presented with the words "I" and "we" to press. Now if I actually wanted to type "Canada" I could merely just enlarge the keyboard and go ahead and the moment I pressed "a" it would give me a couple of obvious options and let me continue on.
That's what I'd like to see.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Maybe you shouldn't be using a phone then. So long as the primary purpose of a device is two-way audio communications, it's going to (or should) be designed to do that best. Now, even though I am a Fat American(tm), I know that a lot of the world uses text messaging more than anything else. So - shouldn't there instead be a text-messaging device that's also a phone, instead of a phone that's also a text messaging device?
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Letter frequency research seems a slightly bizzare topic in the 21st century - Bring back the Linotype keyboards !! As regards other languages - http://www.bckelk.uklinux.net/words/etaoin.html is a good starting list of letter frequencies.
QWERTY cell phones? Since when? Cell phones are not QWERTY in layout and never were unless someone is using a detachable keypad, which I hae never seen and which NOBODY even uses. LOOK at your cell phone key pads, people!
If cellphone keypads were QWERTY, then the '1' key would have th letters "QWE" on it, the number '2' would have "RTY" and so on. THAT'S what the QWERTY layout is all about!
But I guess no one has bothered to look up what QWERTY actually means as far as an actual keyboard layout goes for this article.
Cell phone keypads are alphabetic.
But, as far as the article is concerned, the keyboard layout follows the Mencia Layout - De de DE!
Lee Darrow, C.H.
Yes it's "possibly better", But not actually better.. In reality it is something that doesn't actually make typing on a phone any easier and will only serve to confuse people who use it.
God Be Gone
Try to create an English sentence of 160 letters but only 4 words.
The mobiescence site says it can by typed in 20 seconds on a QWERTY keyboard with 164 keystrokes.
I'm not one of those people who rants on about the dvorak keyboard or anything, I'm pretty happy with my keyboard, but I recognize that it was DESIGNED explicitly to slow down fast typists that were breaking the keyboards of manual typewriters.
Although I know it doesn't really slow down or speed up cell phone typists (if they are used to the qwerty layout it might help them get used to it a little quicker), but the irony is oh so sweet.
A while back on Leno, they pitted a teenaged, self-proclaimed fast text messager against an old guy who knew Morse code. They gave each of them the same message to send, and started them at the same moment to see who could send their message faster.
The Morse code guy pretty much kicked that cell phone whippersnapper's ass.
thats all wrong.
Using a phone with one hand is pure pain, the keys should NOT be at the
bottom of the phone (as you hold it), but at the top, so your thumb can
reach the bottom key without scrunching (or dropping your phone).
Duh.
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I'm sorry. Perhaps I've forgotten my history, but wasn't QWERTY originally invented to decrease efficiency so users wouldn't jam the keys? Moving cell phones to Qwerty will make it easier for cell phone users to type only because more people are used to a standard that should have been abandoned decades ago
I think the Onyx Concept phone makes more sense. The company has developed a very robust and versatile touch sensitive film, which can then be placed over the screen and used as a keyboard. The idea is that the whole phone is one big screen and the keys can appear in any size and shape depending on the task at hand. That way you can have both a big screen and a big keyboard rather than having a compromise between the two.
Apparently their their touch screen technology allows for two finger input and proximity sensing which opens up even more possibilities.
Promptu's focus is more on using voice to navigate menus and features than on sending text messages. I don't know how useful or necessary either ability really is, but here's their website if you're interested: http://www.promptu.com/
Agent Smith says: "What good is a phone call if you're unable to speak?"
Does their little dictionary contain all of the latin names for every genus and species, or only the ones that occur in text-off competitions?
Does open-ended mean they can deduce the spellings of new words through the power of mental telepathy?
I like to consider myself extremely gullible, but that video isn't working on me.
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It seems you have been leading two lives, Mr. Anderson. In one life, you are Robert Anderson, assistant cook at a Jack in the Box in Mesquite....in the other...you go by the chat alias "Randerson"...spreading homosexual propoganda, lying, and being a generally immature pest...
One of these...has a future.
LMAO OMFG where's the phone, I have to tell Dean about this
How can you use the phone when you cannot...speak?
*** AgentSmith sets mode: +m
:(){
It seems you have been leading two lives, Mr. Anderson. In one life, you are Robert Anderson, assistant cook at a Jack in the Box in Mesquite....in the other...you go by the chat alias "Randerson"...spreading homosexual propoganda, lying, and being a generally immature pest...
<AgentSmith> One of these...has a future.
<Randerson> LMAO OMFG where's the phone, I have to tell Dean about this
<AgentSmith> How can you use the phone when you cannot...speak?
*** AgentSmith sets mode: +m
:(){
I am sure that soon we will have readers for our text messages, and then your dream will be complete.
My LG 9800 can read text messages back to me. None of my friends use txtspeak, though, so I don't know how it translates that.
:(){
I recently upgraded my work keitai to an AU W42SA (Sanyo) with "smooth touch" input. If enabled, smooth touch turns the number ad into a track pad. You can scroll, tap-click and draw pictures by dragging a finger across the number pad or tapping it. It also has a pretty accurate handwriting input that is much better than my experiences with other such systems like graffiti. It reliably recognizes Japanese kana, numbers and English letters (upper and lowercase). After a week I can write about as fast as I type with the number pad (I hope to get faster and actually make it worth my while). However it is difficult to do in a crowded train...
We have done "voice-to-text" with pager, haven't we?
Does this mean I can finally get my Rotary Cell Phone?
WOOHOO!
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Most people who are particularly concerned with typing efficiency are people with years of experience and very good efficiency on QWERTY keyboards; while Dvorak may be easier to develop efficiency with from the ground up, you'll take a proficiency hit if you are an excellent typist with years of experience with QWERTY.
I had been typing at 80+ wpm on QWERTY for years when I switched. One week after first looking at the Dvorak layout, I was typing comfortably at 35 wpm; after two weeks I was back at 80+ wpm, only my wrists hurt less at that speed.
People talk about how it'll take a while for QWERTY people to switch, but it's not really that long. Most of the effort of learning to type is learning finger mechanics; the idioms ("th", etc.) are a relatively minor piece -- and *much* easier in Dvorak, since it was explicitly designed for them.
Plus, lots of people concerned with typing efficiency can't control the layout of every keyboard they might need to use, so switching layouts for their main use would require maintaining proficiency in both.
I've found that this isn't as true as you might believe. Any Mac or WinXP or Linux system can be changed without "admin" rights. If you're a professional developer you doubly have no excuse, since I've seen many a developer bring their own keyboard to work.
And even "maintaining proficiency in both" isn't exactly hard. I haven't typed regularly on a QWERTY keyboard in years, but I can still touch-type on one if I need to (though maybe only 40-50 wpm). My team at work has people from 5 different countries, and none of them have managed to forget their native tongue yet. And you don't need to "maintain" knowing how to ride a bicycle.
In fact, having to type on a QWERTY keyboard is no big deal -- it screws me up far less than, say, those dumb Dell keyboards where page-up/down are in the wrong place. So if you have to switch between that and a normal keyboard daily, then you can handle switching QWERTY-Dvorak daily.
And, of course, schools are going to keep teaching people on whatever is most common, so QWERTY has a pretty solid lock.
Maybe we can do something about that. After all, they taught me the metric system in school, because they said we'd all be using it by the time we got out. (Sadly, I'm still using MPH and degrees F and gallons and pounds -- this crap's as bad as QWERTY!) We just have to convince some school administrators that Dvorak is the future.
Same as dvorak, well there are "some other languages" dvorak like keyboard distributions.
The main problem with that is the amount of different keyboards that have to be built to acomplish with all the languages in the world.
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Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better.
DNRTFA so I it may have been answered. Just make sure you remember your standard layout when you call a number and is asks you to spell the last name or you hear the 1-800-call-now numbers on the radio.
LOL, it's QWERTY keyboard. Not QUERTY as you typo'd repeatedly .. didn't you realize this when typing out Q U E R T Y you had to reach over to the letter "U"?
.. I make spelling mistakes too. This one's funny though.
Gosh I hate being a typo stickler
If anything, "emulating the QWERTY layout" is nothing more than marketing for these folks. The real boost here comes from someone else.
Refer back to the title of my post: ETAOIN SHRDLU. It's a mnemonic you see a lot in cryptographic circles, and you can memorize it as though it were a name. It's not an abbreviation, though; it's a list of the twelve most common letters in the English language, in order of how common they're used (E being the most common). If you were to count the letters in the words in an English dictionary, these twelve letters would account for the vast bulk of them.
Now, look at the keyboard again, and take a look at the letters that require only one keypress: ETOARI SHN. Or, scrambled up just a but, ETAOIN SHR: the first nine letters of our mnemonic. This is where the real efficiency boost comes in: the letters that make up over 70% of written English require only one keypress each.
D, L, and U, you will notice, only take two keypresses each. There are slightly better positions for these than the ones they chose, and they freely admit that. They chose to keep the second- and third-letter presses more QWERTY-like for what essentially amount to branding purposes. The real boost comes from the statistical placement of the letters.
Text communication is also often slower. It takes forever to text something by typing it in, the record is what like 30-40 words a minute or something? The only way this wouldn't be true is to carry around a device with a large enough keyboard that would allow you type faster. This makes the device a lot larger, which something I do not want in a device I carry around with me everywhere. The other alternative is voice recognition, which if you're going to use you might as well just be talking to the other party. Also you have to wait for a response from the person you're texting.
To state that voice communication is going to disappear is absurd. I can only see texting people if you know that you or them can't talk or you have a real quick question like "can it run linux?" In the first case, there's very little information that I need so immediately that I couldn't call them later when we're both available or just email them. In the second case, it often takes less time to call them and go, "Hey this is so and so, can that thing run linux?" instead of spending 30 seconds punching it in.
Instant chat rooms on phones is even more ludicrous. I really don't understand that. I can maybe see texting a message or two in unusual circumstances, but to carry on full conversations this way at the amazing rate of 10 - 20 words a minute? No thanks.
MobileQwerty is a step to the right direction, but Mr Dvorak did similar studies a long time ago and came up with the Dvorak layout, which is better (I use Dvorak). So, where is my MobileDvorak, please?
Not to be a troll or anything, but...
That layout is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever seen.
Just when people are becoming accustomed to the logical ABC layout on small keypads, they decide to just introduce a seemingly random order of the letters. That is not qwerty. It's ewqtuy. The last thing people need is to learn an ordering of letters all over again.
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Is there a simple image of the layout? If I'm being blind forgive me but with no flash installed (or getting into my ram even temporarily just for this) I'm not seeing anything. A confirmation gnash (or whatever it is called) will work might get me trying that though.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
What sort of crack are you smoking? They did no such thing. uio are all on different keys. O and I are first on their respective keys; U is second on its key. The layout has ETAOINSHR all as the 1st letter on the 9 keys; DLUP and 5 others I don't remember as the second letter. This puts the 9 most common letters with a single key-press, then the second 9 most common letters needing 2 keypresses, and then the 8 remaining take 3 keypresses.
-DwS
for a cellphone, i'd rather have a fastap kpad. lg has it already on one of its units. hope the other manufacturers will follow suit.
French and German keyboards of the QWERTY family already diddle with the assignment of the A, Q, W, Y, and Z keys. I'd imagine that version of the MobileQWERTY keypad for Welsh (y Gymraeg) would put common Welsh letters earlier in the sequence than letters that don't occur in native Welsh words.
Ok, this is a good idea. It makes sense. However.. phones are often used to connect to and use IVR systems, this will screw up some of those systems. Think of a company directory, "Enter the first 3 letters of the person's last name using your keypad.". Granted, it's a pretty limited problem, but it doesn't seem like anyone has pointed it out yet.
Speak before you think
MessagEase is definitely a better way to go. Check the HardKey simulator. (Although I don't know that a double-press for everything is better than a single press for the most common and a triple press for least common.)
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
Threni above covers many uses. Others include:
- When you or the other party is in a loud place - a concert or bar - and you are arranging to meet.
- If someone is somewhere where the signal is bad or there is no signal - when they eventually do get a signal, the message comes in.
- If you are sitting with a group of people, you can send a quick text discretely whereas making a call might be a bit rude.
- When you know someone is out of the country, and calling them would run up their bill.
- When you are out of the country, and calling would run up your bill.
- When you know someone is at work or somewhere else where taking a personal call could be inappropriate.
The culture of texting is not well developed in the USA because it took so long for the cell phone network companies to get their sh*t together to make it work. Elsewhere, it has worked well and was initially free, and then later still usually cheap.
In my experience, people who say texting is silly etc are almost always from the USA. If it worked well from the start in the USA, and the price was fair, people would use it.
"hld yr phone ovr guttr - sndng pss in 10 scnds"
Seriously, your comparison doesn't mean much (I think the GP was talking more about how we get so used to multitasking we never shut it all off and enjoy something directly)
The SO is racing towards the main hall -- and she doesn't have to fiddle with buttons while running, she can *speak* a text message into the phone. "did it start? where r u sitting?". Your phone vibrates silently; you can text back (without making noise by taking a call) "lites dn but doors still open - balcny aisle 3 on rt".
Yeah, it's not a feature to die for, but what the heck. Sometimes we don't have hands and eyes free to text. Sometimes we don't want to make noise by talking. It makes some sense to let users mix & match the options.
Welsh has lots of vowels, including w and y, as well as diphthongs. It's Hebrew and Arabic that omit written vowels.
1) Whoosh.
2) Whoosh again.
3) Everybody already knows about French keyboards, thanks very much.
The point is that if you arrange the keyboard dependent on letter frequency, and that differs by language, then you have to have different layouts too. That's an added cost for the manufacturer, and probably a nuisance to users.
It's the old principle that explains how QWERTY (or whatever) persists. Being better isn't always enough. When there's an existing standard, the new one has to be a lot better.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
well if you 're not keen on voice recognition then why not just try a faster predictive text system? i downloaded a free trial version of AdapTex from www.adaptexlive.com and ended up buying the full version. i don't know how it works but it learns your vocabulary and predicts words and sentences. it halves the time it takes to type it out normally, and is about a million times better than T9 cos it learns names, made up words, and my own made up grammar rather than trying to force its own on me. Anyway, i liked it. anyone else tried it?