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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)."
... would have compared more than those few mainstream input methods. Particularly interesting: Dvorak keyboards and Tikinotes, Swype and MessageEase for the iPhone.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I went to jury duty the other day, and the steno reporter... wasn't really using a steno machine. She was annotating the taping by speaking the non-verbal events into a little mouth-shield thingie.
So verbal dictation is possible- you'll just like more of a geek.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
It's not what you'd call a rich data set, and of course the Qwerty keyboard comes up trumps
I of course have to mention the Dvorak layout. I encourage you to try it. Your hands might thank you (and fall in love), and if not you can always go back rather easily. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
Also, for some experimental geekery, trying to find out whether it's all the shit it's made out to be, see http://klausler.com/evolved.html
That's it. Thank you for listening. My hands thank me for listening way back when, too ;)
I used to be lightning fast with the original graffiti, very close to my speed on the iPhone. But Palm went and changed it (I know legal reasons etc) and it got slow and sucky. The best part of graffiti was that you could take notes without looking at the device. I would think the original graffiti would be much faster than it is on that table, or they got a newbie to do the graffiti writing.
The iPhone keyboard works amazingly well. I saw the preview demo of the phone in 2007and I thought that soft keyboard was full of fail (30+ touch points in the size of two postage stamps-c'mon), but there's enough heuristics behind it that it actually works really well. I'm way faster on the iPhone keyboard than I am on a crackberry keyboard.
Sheldon
That's the problem with this sort of comparison - it's completely subjective. Until pretty recently I simply had no reason to use pen and paper, but used a keyboard all the time, so my typing speed was respectable but my writing speed was atrocious. However, I have recently forced myself to rediscover the wonders of writing by hand, and I know I could write with pen and paper faster than plenty of people can type. Professional typists could have typed his example text in, what, a little over a minute? People who need to keep notes professionally, PAs or scribes or whatever, could probably get it written in about the same time. I think keyboards are logically bound to be slightly faster, but if you think pen and paper is slow you've never seen my girlfriend write in a hurry. Of course, a keyboard tends to produce fairly readable text, but that's a different (but related) issue...
Be smart, help people!
Imagine trying to use photoshop on a touch screen. All the areas you want to select are automatically obscured by the very finger(s) that are doing the selecting. How stoooopid is that?
That's the very thing I really HATE about capacitive touch-screens. All this blah blah blah about how much precision it has. What the heck do I mind its precision when I don't know where I've put my finger, since I cannot see what's behind it? Not to speak of the problems using a screen of these when you're wearing gloves and such.
This things are really stupid. I can get far more accuracy in my old Palm TX since I can use a stylus as thin as I want, my fingernail or just the reverse side of the BIC pen I'm using to write down on paper.
The other thing about handwriting is that you can do it one handed at decent speed. If you have one hand holding a clipboard, notepad, tablet, etc, you need good text input with one hand. If you only ever write where you can use 2 hands, such as at your desk, a keyboard (ie PC or laptop) is probably best.
This depends on the strings: you can handwrite many mathematical expressions more quickly than you can type them in most setups. This is especially true for things with a lot of super/sub scripts. It's *especially* true for symbols not in the character sets available to you.
Also, sometimes the same *content* can be recorded more quickly as handwritten math/logic than as typed strings.
Sometimes handwriting is faster, sometimes typing is faster.
Therefore, the fastest setup is one where you can switch between handwriting and typing seamlessly, such as on a tablet PC on some sort of stand situated like an easel with an external keyboard at elbow height, or at a desktop with a keyboard and graphics tabletin which case, for the monitor position, you don't have to compromise between what's good for your hands/arms and what's good for your eyes/neck/back.
If you want to use Photoshop, buy yourself a stylus.
On the other hand, perhaps you've seen artists doing charcoal sketches? You know, where they use that giant stick of charcoal (that obscures where they're working), and then they smudge it with, gasp, their fingers?
The finger isn't great for everything, but it certainly works fine for a lot of tasks.
The tests were done using a 221 word long paragraph in English. How fast would any of these methods be at entering something like the Schrödinger Equation? Sure, you could type "i\hbar\frac{\partial\psi}{\partial t} = \frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\nabla^2\psi + V(\mathbf{r})\psi" on a keyboard just about as easily as "I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in Great Britain", but realizing that you've made a mistake and fixing it would be difficult.
Some things are easier with a keyboard and some things that are just easier to do with a pen and paper, be they real or virtual.
the iPhone virtual keyboard came in a surprisingly close second... This probably matches most people's experience
Not at all. There is no way the iPhone keyboard can possibly be as fast to use as a physical qwerty keypad. I can only imagine that there's something sub-optimal about the Treo keyboard (having never tried it myself). Alternatively, perhaps the author hasn't used his Treo for a while, whereas he's well-practised on the iPhone at the moment.
Don't get me wrong, I think virtual keyboards on touch screens are a wonderful innovation, and I personally would never buy a device with a physical keyboard, due to the extra bulk and weight it engenders in the device. At the end of the day, I read stuff on my phone a lot more often than I enter data, so I want the device optimised for viewing and portability rather than speed of text entry.
But that doesn't change the fact that a tactile keyboard is quicker than a virtual one. Perhaps the "swipe" style virtual keyboards that are now appearing will turn this around.
I'm sorry, but is the submitter fscking insane? I rely heavily on handwritten notes all the time. So does every college student and scientist that I know. Note that I'm talking about extremely tech-savvy people here, who often DO own an iPhone... but they are fundamentally useless for taking notes.
Taking notes, of course, is not the only writing one does, but it's a pretty important thing. Writing serves a a communication medium to others, but equally serves as expansion of short- and long-term memory for ourselves. I have yet to meet any GUI interface that has the flexibility of a pad of paper:
- Effortless data entry.
- Figures, mathematics or other non-ASCII input are faster than any other technique (and likely to remain so)
- No learning curve (for people past 6th grade)
- Bookmarking, fast page finding.
- No limit to page-space viewable at one time
-Needs no recharging, syncing
- Not a target for theft
- Light and comfortable in the hand
- Cheap, reliable components
- Easily backed up by photocopier or scanner
The only downside, for me, is it's a little slow for pure-text entry, and it's sometimes hard to read by own sloppy writing. But that's just user skill, not the fault of the technology.
I'm surprised that Palm Graffiti came in last place, especially by that big of a margin. I used a Palm Pilot extensively for several years, and I could "write" on my Palm Pilot much faster than I could write on pen and paper.
It took a few weeks to get used to it, but after you learned Graffiti well enough, you could actually "write" pretty fast with it. The test behind TFA apparently used a novice to test Palm's Graffiti. A Palm Pilot veteran would have been able to write in Graffiti at speeds nearer to actual writing, and maybe faster.
I have a bad feeling about this...
A two finger drag will scroll inside a text box.
As well writing is more flexible. You can add symbols, underline things and circle things. You can stick in a therefore symbol, have arrows pointing to parts. Italicize. Make up your own symbols. Super efficient shorthand. Math input. Diagrams. You may not need all of that but if you need any of it your speed will cut horribly on a phone...
All of this makes handwriting much more efficient for note taking.