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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."
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
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.
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.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
That's what the "Next" button is for on your phone. I think T9 is great. If you only have 9 keys, you're still going to need T9. I doesn't matter how you lay out the letters, it's always faster to type 1 key than average 2 keys for each letter. Depending on how smart the software is, T9 can really speed you up.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
T9's annoying. (a) I often text in other languages than English - business reasons. (b) it's too much like Clippy. 'Did you mean "foo"?' (when I try to type "doo".)
-b.
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).
QWERTY was designed to reduce the jamming of keys, so it allowed fast typists go faster, not slowing them down! That it was designed to reduce the efficiency of typists is a very common (and wrong) myth.
Speed Dial for Firefox
Then why don't they use the Dvorak layout? It's theoretically more efficient and the punctuation will be grouped to one key.
I've been typing on Dvorak for years; why would they leave all non-QWERTY (default) users in the cold?
Maybe the real question is this: why hasn't Dvorak caught on? Is change really that hard?
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.
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. 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.
And, of course, schools are going to keep teaching people on whatever is most common, so QWERTY has a pretty solid lock.
I started practicing Dvorak for a couple of days, and I could see the potential. Then I tried to use it with a word processor and found that the common shortcuts, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, etc. were no longer right there for the left hand to use. It took two hands to type them, so the shortcuts weren't as efficient as before. I found that trying to re-map shortcuts, combined with setting every computer I sit down at to a Dvorak-style keyboard just to gain a little time, too much of a pain to deal with.
Try explaining to secretaries and union members that they have to switch. Please report back with your results.