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8pen Reinvents the Keyboard For Mobile Devices
An anonymous reader submitted linkage to a company called 8pen that has a new take on one-handed input. I've attached the video if you click the link below, but it's a strange idea using outward spreading swipes that somewhat mimics handwriting. It ships for Android tomorrow, but even if you don't want to try it out, it's an interesting idea for anyone who is tired of finger tapping on a tiny screen.
My parent's generation is still trying to figure out 3-3-3 for F, despite having an alpha-numeric keypad since the days of rotary phones. How are they supposed to learn this?
You know, you could add a pen to the device, so you don't have to deal with, say, something that makes it hard to swipe your finger across the screen and reduce the grease in the screen.
Then, after that, you could make the movements more like handwritting, since people are used to that.
Then, maybe, to help people write things faster, put split areas for letters and numbers.
You know, I think I saw that somewhere else before....
This seems like a bit of an awkward kludge - capacitive touchscreens are evidently not terribly well suited to such precise inputs.
It's been about 10 years since I've regularly used a Palm Pilot. Handwriting recognition on those devices Worked. I could get quite consistent input, at roughly the same speed as I could writing by hand.
To this day, my written "T" still looks like a "7" on occasion. It felt quite natural and, as far as I know, no handwriting mechanism has come close to rivaling it for effectiveness/consistency.
Do the WebOS devices still have this capability?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
What....??? ....I .... Wait.... Are you saying that a Slashdot news story covered.... an innovative piece of software that isn't free??? Well I never! This will not stand! Slashdot, I hereby tender my resignation, effective immediately!
The issue with swype is that, no matter how good you get at it, you still have to pay attention to the screen.
With this, you could type without looking at the screen, finally allowing smartphone owners to text and drive as efficiently as the luddites with their old-school keypads. ;)