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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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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 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.
Umm... Its QWERTY, not QUERTY. Didn't typing the U slow you down?
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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.
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.
-b.
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.
Actually, he tried typing QWERTY, but it caused the keys to jam, so that internet didn't make it through the tubes.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
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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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Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
On T9, "he" and "if" are jammed together on 43. On MobileQWERTY, they are not.
--
Evan
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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.
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
Obviously, everyone knows their QWERTY a lot better than they know their ABCs.
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This is one of the longest running, most prevalent urban legends. See 1, 2, 3.
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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!
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.
But that's still 1.35. Which is greater than 1. With predictive text input, some words don't even require you to type all the letters. If you have 9 letter word, you may only have to type in 6 letters before that word is the only choice. This works a lot better than having to type more keys than letters, and will almost always be faster. I think a combination of the two technologies would be the best solution.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
On slashdot? Obviously. We see Qwerty or local equivalents every day. When was the last time you needed your ABC? Lists don't count, your computer will sort them for you.
:)
They might as well start teaching QWERTY instead of ABC in school and then do a study on how that affected average nationwide typing speeds
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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Damn, forgot to double my u. That is the worst typo I've ever made; to spell it right I should only have to drag my finger across the first alphabetic row of keys!
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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.
Who the hell said that A should come before B anyway? and why should Z be at the end? I say give Z some love, put it before J, which is a stupid letter anyway.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
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.
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.
Try explaining to secretaries and union members that they have to switch. Please report back with your results.
I think it's because of that song.
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