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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."
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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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.
-b.
This is one of the longest running, most prevalent urban legends. See 1, 2, 3.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
Hmm,
The parent doesn't look anything like a troll to me. Nope. Snopes.com totally debunked that QWERTY myth. I just don't have a link handy.
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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.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why don't they rearrange the numbers to match the number pad on my keyboard?
I was thrilled when I tried T9, but actually I think I prefer not to use it :
for small words (and perhaps more problematically while less frequently for
long words) it is hard to guess how many times you will have to press
the "next" button. So it requires more attention than simply typing automatically
(especially without having to watch the screen while typing) : knowing that
pressing three times this key will give this character is predictable.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Look, the layout is:
EWQ TUY OP
1 2 3
ADZ RFV IWJ
4 5 6
SCX HGB NMK
7 8 9
Each letter is ordered by usage (in English) on the keys, and the arrangement is as close to QWERTY as you can get given that there are only 9 keys and the goal is to put the most common letters earliest on the keys. It's as QWERTY-like as possible while still being useful. Looking at it I find most of the letters near where I'd expect them given familiarity with the standard QWERTY layout.
It's almost as if you didn't follow ANY of the links....
-DwS
One thing to consider: By statistically laying out the alphabet, with high frequency letters spread over all keys, you increase the likelihood that a phone number will spell something in the NEW system.
Right now, the numbers 0,1,5 and 9 have very little use (because they only have the letters JKLWXYZ on them), In this new system, there would be 9 numbers with the nine most popular letters on them.
So you'd just need to know which system 1-800-HOTnWET uses - old or new. Unconverted, it might be a carwash, converted it might be for phone sex.