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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."
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.
Actually, QWERTY was designed to keep the typebars from sticking together, which was happening too much with an alphabetic layout. It wasn't to slow typists down, but that might have been a side effect.
A popular legend, but not actually based in fact.
Here is a pretty decent discussion of the truth - and some of the hype - about Dvorak vs. qwerty.
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You don't have to forget qwerty. I used dvorak for a while, and while I don't remember it well enough anymore to really be productive with it, I could switch back and forth between the two without too much difficulty. I remember typing faster qwerty (not "correct" qwerty, but my slightly hybrid version) than dvorak, but that was probably 6 years of qwerty vs. 2 months of dvorak.
It's like knowing C and Python seperately. You can code in either C or Python without forgetting the other every time you need to switch languages. You might slip up here and there with syntax or function names until you've built up some decent experience with both of them, but knowing both opens up a lot of options. The same could be said for multiple keyboard layouts. Knowing both provides options.
My Blackberry uses a qwerty letter arrangement (over 5 keys instead of 3, but the point remains). It allows me to enter letters directly into the number I am dialing and then converts the letters into the appropriate numbers before placing the call. For example, in the number you provide, I would enter 1-800-COMCAST. My Blackberry would then convert that into 1-800-266-2278 and place the call.