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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
Umm... Its QWERTY, not QUERTY. Didn't typing the U slow you down?
/whisper/ Thanks for the candy!
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.
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.
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.
I now switch you back to your regularly-scheduled browsing.
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
Obviously, everyone knows their QWERTY a lot better than they know their ABCs.
must... stay... awake...
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.