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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)."
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.
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.