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Death of the Cell Phone Keypad As We Know It?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the two-to-beam-up dept.

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."

4 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. speech into text by yagu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  2. Re:Death knell of the keypad - a little overdramat by El+Torico · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I thought that this line was one of the most amusing things I've read in a while -

    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.
  3. Re:Qwertyesque way? by Neil+Hodges · · Score: 5, Insightful
    So they've also been set up to avoid jamming?

    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?

  4. This might be a stupid question, but... by thesolo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.