Death of the Cell Phone Keypad As We Know It?

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."

Death?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny how so many of these things die but still stick around...

You know, so many iPod killers out there, they should be dead by now right? And CDs... they're dead too and the MP3s did it, right? Even DVDs, HD and BluRay are killing them as well. It's only a matter of time. Oh and DAPs are dying too. They'll be replaced by cell phones.

What else is dying and will never actually go away?

speech into text

[yagu]

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

Texting is for when you _can't_ talk

[MarsBar]

Well duh, that's just stupid. Yes, speaking might be quicker than texting but if I'm somewhere I can text using speech recognition I might as well pick up the phone and talk.

Re:Qwertyesque way?

[jackb_guppy]

But Qwerty was designed to SLOW DOWN Typing to allow time for key to hit via pressure and then fall back via gravity. So this new layout is to slow down typing and allow gravity to return the key... I hope they built them strong enought for all the falling from hands.

QWERTY...

[b0s0z0ku]

was not designed for typing efficiency. It was designed to actually slow down typists so that fast typers wouldn't jam the type bars in old-fashioned manual typewriters. The other problem with dumping the 2-ABC 3-DEF system on the keypad is that you'll break lots of 1-800 numbers for people who don't know any better.

-b.

Re:Death knell of the keypad - a little overdramat

[El Torico]

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.

Re:Qwertyesque way?

[CastrTroy]

That's what the "Next" button is for on your phone. I think T9 is great. If you only have 9 keys, you're still going to need T9. I doesn't matter how you lay out the letters, it's always faster to type 1 key than average 2 keys for each letter. Depending on how smart the software is, T9 can really speed you up.

Re:T9

[b0s0z0ku]

somebody's already come up with T9 which works well enough for most people for entering large amounts of text instead of numbers.

T9's annoying. (a) I often text in other languages than English - business reasons. (b) it's too much like Clippy. 'Did you mean "foo"?' (when I try to type "doo".)

-b.

MobileQwerty

[mattwarden]

Why would a qwerty layout on a 10 digit keypad be more efficient than some other layout? They seem to be assuming that the knowledge a user has to use a qwerty layout on a traditional keypad would translate easily to the 10 digit layout. I'm not so sure that's how it works (and I was a Cognitive Science major).

Re:QWERTY...

[joseprio]

QWERTY was designed to reduce the jamming of keys, so it allowed fast typists go faster, not slowing them down! That it was designed to reduce the efficiency of typists is a very common (and wrong) myth.

Re:Qwertyesque way?

[Neil Hodges]

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?

This might be a stupid question, but...

[thesolo]

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.

Re:Qwertyesque way?

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't answer my point at all. They haven't modified the size or number of keys in this new arrangement, nor the fact that the keypad will be part of an handheld device, so my point stands - why emulate the layout of a completely different class of device when mobiles and PC keyboards have little usage in common? The other glaring fact is that we have all now learnt to type with the ABC DEF keypad system - a new system will have to be learnt again, defeating the whole point of the project!

Re:Qwertyesque way?

[DragonWriter]

Maybe the real question is this: why hasn't Dvorak caught on? Is change really that hard?

Most people who are particularly concerned with typing efficiency are people with years of experience and very good efficiency on QWERTY keyboards; while Dvorak may be easier to develop efficiency with from the ground up, you'll take a proficiency hit if you are an excellent typist with years of experience with QWERTY. Plus, lots of people concerned with typing efficiency can't control the layout of every keyboard they might need to use, so switching layouts for their main use would require maintaining proficiency in both.

And, of course, schools are going to keep teaching people on whatever is most common, so QWERTY has a pretty solid lock.

Re:Qwertyesque way?

[bjdevil66]

I started practicing Dvorak for a couple of days, and I could see the potential. Then I tried to use it with a word processor and found that the common shortcuts, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, etc. were no longer right there for the left hand to use. It took two hands to type them, so the shortcuts weren't as efficient as before. I found that trying to re-map shortcuts, combined with setting every computer I sit down at to a Dvorak-style keyboard just to gain a little time, too much of a pain to deal with.

Re:I call ...

[r_jensen11]

People talk about how it'll take a while for QWERTY people to switch, but it's not really that long. Most of the effort of learning to type is learning finger mechanics; the idioms ("th", etc.) are a relatively minor piece -- and *much* easier in Dvorak, since it was explicitly designed for them.

Try explaining to secretaries and union members that they have to switch. Please report back with your results.