Pen vs. Keyboard vs. Touch vs. Everything Else

benz001 writes "In the run-up to everyone's favourite tablet, Phil Gyford goes back through his gadget collection and compares text entry speeds to see which one comes out on top. It's not what you'd call a rich data set, and of course the Qwerty keyboard comes up trumps, but the iPhone virtual keyboard came in a surprisingly close second, just edging out the Treo — and all the keyboard solutions regardless of how small and fiddly beat real pen and paper. This probably matches most people's experience (when was the last time you had to handwrite more than a bullet point in a meeting?) and gels pretty well with Macworld's predictions but I'm still hoping for sub-vocal voice recognition. (Jump straight to the final results here)."

Comments

Re:Slow QWERTY typer

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Where does your mom work? I read a story a couple years ago about how they no longer teach shorthand to journalists in Britain, but that the UK had been the hold-out -- they haven't taught shorthand in American journalism schools in years. I'm curious where your mom picked it up. I don't even completely understand how shorthand works, but it sounds eminently useful.

(Then again, one mistake that note-takers often make is trying to write down everything that's said, which means they aren't really parsing the information in real time. If you're actually listening to the speaker, you can often write down just the germane points, so you don't really need to write as fast as a typist can type.)