

5 Tiles Keyboard - intull
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=etaoiDemo.five

======
cool-RR
Public service announcement to all companies that are trying to sell us
keyboards or keyboard-like solutions:

I fully expect, when I go into your site, to see a video of someone using your
keyboard to type FAST. (Which is probably the most important criteria in a
keyboard.)

This is essential because if your own people who developed the keyboard can
only get to X wpm, odds are low that your average users are going to exceed X
wpm.

If I don't see a video of someone using your keyboard to type fast, _I 'm
going to assume that you were not able to produce such a video, because your
keyboard doesn't really allow for someone to type fast, which means that your
keyboard is pretty much useless._

Thank you.

~~~
intull
They do have a video :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUjBdMz1q8I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUjBdMz1q8I)

~~~
sexmonad
That video is just auto-complete after the first letter...

~~~
mobilemaggie
Yes, it's a practice application with pangrams, with the auto-complete turned
on. Here's a video of a speed test with everything turned off:
[http://youtu.be/xigziUyUcrM](http://youtu.be/xigziUyUcrM) (good point to get
this more visible on the website)

------
gbog
If the people doing this are listening: I don't think the business model is
ok. If this keyboard is to get some traction, it will require us users to use
it for real before paying. You can't have a keyboard lite, it's a vital
utility, not a game. If I type a url or a password and discover that a
character is only on premium, I'll switch back to my usual keyboard and not
look back.

Another remark: typing number is very important and must be safe and fast, I
didn't see a number mode. It should be easily done on five tiles.

~~~
matthewrudy
Swiftkey's approach is to give you 30 days free. Of course you can get around
this, but with Swiftkey the more you use it, the more it learns. I imagine
they have reasonable conversion rates.

------
nzonbi
This is an interesting design, independently if it may or may not be
successful. In my opinion the keyboard should be reinvented. The qwerty and
similar designs works, but not for everybody. I for example, took a course on
using qwerty correctly, with all fingers, and without having to look at it,
and failed. I can type fairly fast, but must look at the keys most of the
time, and mostly use both index fingers only. The arrangement feels not
intuitive for me, more like a mess. I can't never remember where a key is
located exactly. All I can memorize are approximate locations. I am sure that
at least for me, there could be better keyboard implementations. I have been
thinking, and have some ideas. Both for on-screen touch, and physical
keyboards. I may try implementing them soon.

There is currently a cool trend on the PC market, in which companies are
trying innovative form factors. The hybrid laptop-tablets are becoming
popular. There are great devices on the market. MS surface 3, lenovo yoga and
miix, asus convertibles, acer R7 and switch, are good examples. But the way I
see it, these devices are saddened by the ugly and not cool qwerty keyboards.
I wonder why those companies that have the resources, and are eager to
differentiate on the market, haven't tried any alternative to the old qwerty.
The world needs more creativity. For example, what does stop Microsoft, from
offering a choice of alternative keyboard implementations as surface covers?
In my opinion this is a big missed opportunity, and I hope these companies
realize it someday. In the meantime, I may soon come up with a homemade
alternative keyboard for my personal use.

For those that the qwerty keyboard works, they should continue using it. But
for those that don't, which I suspect are the majority, could use
alternatives. There is an interesting opportunity in the market for those that
realize it.

~~~
skywhopper
I'm guessing it's harder to learn to touch type these days for folks who spend
huge amounts of time using keyboards. While you're taking the course, you're
partially hobbled by only knowing a few letters by memory, and you spend 90%
of your day needing to actually type, so practicing your new touch-typing has
got to be very hard to do.

I learned to type with two fingers on computers in the 80s and could type
pretty fast, but in high school (90s) I took a semester-long typing class, and
while it was harder at first, touch-typing soon enough became so much faster
it was well worth the effort to overcome my old habits.

You're right that the QWERTY is screwy. It was designed to be. But while I
agree alternative keyboards are something that should be researched, I also
think learning to touch-type qwerty will be such a benefit to anyone who types
much at all that it'll be worth the pain to do so, even though yes, it's
probably way harder today than it was in the early 90s.

------
tsm
On the subject of alternative keyboards, I've been using MessagEase
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.mekb))
for about a year and am pretty pleased with it. It's still roughly the size of
a regular QWERTY keyboard, but the buttons are enormous, and I can type any
letter, number, or symbol I care about without modifier keys. (It accomplishes
this by differentiating between taps and short swipes—so each button has nine
characters assigned to it, the tapping one and then eight for swiping to each
side/corner.)

~~~
Wilduck
I've been using MessageEase too and I really like it. I was fed up with miss-
keying on a standard Qwerty shaped on-screen keyboard, and I really haven't
liked any predictive typing solutions I've tried.

What I like about MessageEase is that the keys are big enough that I don't
ever miss what I'm typing, which eliminates the part of typing that slowed me
down the most--going back and fixing typing errors. I can whip out a 160
character text message in about 30-40 seconds with correct capitalization and
punctuation, which is about all I can ask for in a phone keyboard.

------
leanthonyrn
"Our brains were structured for 5 digits." I would think, if that was the
case, we would first optimize our alphabet for 25/20/15/10/5 characters. Then
this would be ideal.

~~~
p4bl0
Yea, actually I believe this is not true at all.

I learned in an intro to cognitive psychology class that it seems that our
brain is wired to recognize sets of 1, 2, and 3 things directly, but that
after that we construct the numbers. For instance when we see 5 things it is
actually 3+2 that we see. The experiment was based on response time +
accurateness when showing people sets of geometrical shapes for very short
periods of time, sometimes using the same shape for all elements, sometimes
random shapes, and sometimes groups of similar shapes. I don't recall the
precise reference though, maybe someone else knows it?

To get back to the keyboard, I would like to see a demo video of someone
actually typing something with it. The current video doesn't give any sense of
what it is like to use this keyboard, and doesn't make me want to try it at
all.

~~~
wingerlang
There really is a lack of actual usage-videos which is kind of off putting.
The posted "trailer" video didn't make me want to use it either, although this
video
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOPalCIbGA8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOPalCIbGA8)
made me a little bit more curious.

And regarding the 3+2 thing that seems true, I always count to 5 in couples of
3s and 2s.

~~~
p4bl0
I'm sorry I may be stupid but I still don't understand how the keyboard works
after having seen that second video. Seriously they should make a video where
we can see what happens on the keyboard and on the screen at the same time.

Why every time the finger starts to slides the only letters left on the
keyboard are "EABCD"? How do I type an 'n' for instance? I see that they do a
round-trip to enter numbers, but how am I supposed to enter '6'?

These may be the worst demo videos I've ever seen.

I remember another alternative-paradigm keyboard, 8pen, which had pretty good
and instructive videos. They should learn from that.

~~~
adyda
Each of the 5 tiles represent a group of letters/numbers. The reason you see
'EABCD' is because he is only using the first (blue) tile. If you wanted to
type 'n' you would put your finger on the yellow, which contains 'KLONM', and
slide it to the fourth tile.

The numbers I'm not sure. I think it is the same concept with 1-4 on the first
tile (blue) and other numbers on other tiles.

Still doesn't seem like it would be faster for typing.

Blue (1st) tile is EABCD, Green (2nd) is FIGHJ, Yellow (3rd) is KLONM, Orange
(4th) is PQRTS, and Red (5th) is VWXY.

~~~
p4bl0
> he is only using the first (blue) tile

That's what I assumed too, but I didn't want to be sure of it because one have
to be too stupid to do a demo of a product using always the same part. "Look I
designed a keyboard and I can type with it: 'aaaaaaaaaaa'".

Okay, so it means that if I want to type 'n' I hit the 3rd tile and then I
have to move four tiles away. Except I can't. So I guess I'll have to go
backward when I reach the last tile in the direction I chose. But that seem to
conflict with what I inferred for numbers…

------
Splendor
Neither the video or images were compelling enough to get me to install a free
app. Show me someone using the keyboard.

------
1ris
Absolutly awesome. I tried serveral alternative keyboards since the day i own
a smartphone, this is the first one I liked right from the start. Minuum
seemed pretty lame, haven't tried it, but I tried Swype, Swiftkey, GKOS, 8Pen,
and a morse-key keyboard. The latter was very neat in theory, but the learning
curve was just to steep. Now, starting form thre and increasing the number of
buttons from two to five and adding hints on for the fly is IMO genius. Two
thumbs up. Now i want a smartwatch. I just wished there was a explanation what
the difference between the light and the full version is.

/edit: And I think i have a bug: The Enter key does not work, or is that a
limitation of the free edition? Could be, I will buy the full version
tomorrow.

/edit2: No, it's just that i confused "enter" and "go".

~~~
moollaza
I really think you should give Minuum a try. I've used most of the ones you
listed above (Swype, Swiftkey, 8Pen, Fleksy) and ended up sticking with
Minuum. I've been using it for almost a year and don't regret switching. I
used to love Swype, but it started to get pretty slow and once I switched to
Minuum, it was nice to see how much screen space I could reclaim.

------
Hasu
I can't figure out how I'm expected to use more than one digit on this thing
at once. I usually type on a touchscreen keyboard with at least two
fingers(either both thumbs, or the index and middle finger of one hand).

The sliding action makes using two different hands impossible- I can't type
many characters without having to move my thumbs out of each others' way. That
won't work.

This leads me to think that I should use one hand, maybe even four fingers.
But then my entire hand moves position every time I have to slide, which means
I have to move my entire hand back to the start position to use a different
finger for the next character.

The only way I can type with this system is using a single finger, and that's
just way too slow.

------
smoyer
I sometimes do serious work from my Android phone and the keyboard is
extremely important ... I haven't found anything that approaches the
convenience of this keyboard: [http://www.meritline.com/logitech-tablet-
keyboard-android-92...](http://www.meritline.com/logitech-tablet-keyboard-
android-920-003390---p-75240.aspx?source=fghdac&gclid=CjkKEQjwqYacBRDO-
Mrk6_vr8eQBEiQAWJadfI_zvT9tG0-kM5AUFaTKLU1Q6FVpBBml6r83endabIHw_wcB)

------
diggan
Hm, feels like this should make it more complicated to enter text. Let's say I
have a telephone and it has 11 buttons. 0 - 9, call and hang up. This is easy
for a person to remember and use.

But, if we have a telephone with 4 buttons, 0 - 5 is one button, 6 - 9 is
another, call and hang up is two others, the telephone becomes MORE complex
and hard to use.

One button, one functionality feels like the easiest and fastest way to type,
mentally.

~~~
evanb
How quickly we all forget.

It was not that long ago that telephones only had 0-9, *, #, call, and hang
up. People texted like crazy anyway. Push the button multiple times to cycle
through the letters, or enable T9 and let the phone autocomplete the word.

------
k-mcgrady
Just downloaded it to try. WAY too high of a learning curve. For example to
delete a character you swipe up on the first tile (likely accidentally
activating Google Now). To show/hide the cheat sheet swipe down on the fourth
tile. I can tell right from the start this is way too much information to
remember. Swiping keyboards already work pretty well and are quite easy to
pickup.

------
keerthiko
The way they provide responses to their user reviews on the Play store is a
bit off-putting -- they have a very "you're doing it wrong" tone, rather than
accepting the premises and complaints of their users.

I think the basic concept is intriguing, but the lack of intuitive execution
is a huge show-stopper when competing with things like swype.

------
techaddict009
Is is it inspired from Google's Gmail Tap April Fool Prank?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KhZKNZO8mQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KhZKNZO8mQ)

~~~
1ris
There is such a keyboard, i used it, and i case you take the huddle of
learning morse code (that is very hard and requires LOTs of pratice that i
unfortunatly don't have) it's absolutly awesome. Eyes free typing. I think
that shouldn't be a aprils fool.

------
gweinberg
It seems to me that four would be a much better number than five, since our
thumbs do not line up with our fingers.

------
RBerenguel
Pretty similar to other endeavours previously discussed here (like ASETNIOP)

------
Roboprog
So it's like having 10 or 12 buttons to write a text, only worse???

------
Siecje
Doug Engelbart was right about the future.

