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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."
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.