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I've always thought it was a bit odd that for touchscreen phones we just decided to grab the near exact keyboard layout we use with physical keyboards, and just stick them on a tiny touchscreen. Sure, everyone knows how to use it and its fine for early smartphones, but it seems like a really terrible place for a full keyboard to go; imagine using a keyboard the size of your phone keyboard (so about the third the size of your phone itself) for your desktop or laptop. It'd seem insane and impossible to use on a daily basis.

You see the same thing with games. Not so great game designers just copy whats on PC for mobile, and add load of virtual buttons all over the screen. Phones are no good for that, really you want to limit yourself to 3 buttons at any one time at the maximum.

If this could be learned fairly easily, it could be the solution I've been looking for. Of course it won't replace on screen keyboards for everyone, we're too far gone now, but at least there'll be something better availible




My favourite mobile-device keyboard was that of the Sony Ericsson M600i/P1i

https://www.cnet.com/a/img/oje2OkhPIKnnKkJDXCAYnXJBst0=/1200...

Its a rocker-key design: hit the left side, Q, right side, W. The U-shaped key made it super easy to hit the right letter, I could type amazingly quickly on this janky phone from 2006.

Once the capacitive-touch revolution happened, the closest keyboard that really took advantage of the small-screens was the TouchPal T+ keyboard.

It was similar, in that one soft key was Q and W, but you pressed it and swiped left or right for each key, and up and left for capital versions. It also held special characters with a swipe down. This also worked really well, in my opinion, especially on the small screened devices we used to use.

This is all a long winded way of saying, I agree, I think straight QWERTY is still odd, even today!


Hmmm, I actually remember some of Android keyboard like that, it had two letters per key, so one tap - first letter, 2 taps - second letter. Allowed for bigger key size.

Worked a lot like a good old phone numpad, just faster. Crashed a lot.


Likely TouchPal: they supported Windows Mobile and Android back in the day :) It supported the "tap N times" feature too, as like a fancier QWERTY-ish T9


> I've always thought it was a bit odd that for touchscreen phones we just decided to grab the near exact keyboard layout we use with physical keyboards, and just stick them on a tiny touchscreen

This happens with technology all the time. When the printing press was invented the first books were designed to look like their handwritten counterparts. Similarly, when electronic maps happened they were just like paper maps with fixed scales ("zoom levels"), north up, top down etc. It takes a while for people to realise the potential of newer technology for some reason.

Keyboards are a funny one, though. People don't learn to type any more. In fact, people don't really learn to do anything with computers. Millions of people interact with computers every day but have never really learnt to use them effectively, and this goes for both hardware and software. If you want to be a lorry driver, you need a driver's licence. But people get employed all the time to work on computers and nobody ever asks "can you type?" or "can you produce typeset documents to basic quality standards?" Walk into any office in the world and you'll see hunt-and-peck typing and untrained, misuse of common software like MS Word.

The problem is interfaces like a keyboard and MS Word do allow you to do something without any training at all. There would be huge resistance to having a "better" keyboard that required users to learn how to use it. People have been conditioned to expect no training.

A big driver in the trend towards no training is that the powerful players in tech (ad companies) have an interest in getting as wide a userbase as possible. The manufacturer of a locomotive or MRI machine does not care about this and it's fine and expected to need training to operate those machines. I wouldn't expect keyboards, especially those on a phone, to move to anything that requires training any time soon.


I think the electronic maps were limited more by technology than vision.

Google Maps (any many map systems even today) used pre-rendered tiled images, which means you could only zoom at the levels which were rendered and rotating the grid was hard (especially on old hardware)


I was quite surprised when I went to China and looked at people texting with their phones, wondering how many keys they would need in their touchscreen keyboard, and finding out that most of them use... 9.

The classic pre-smartphone phone keyboard, where you write in pinyin and the corresponding Chinese characters get predicted.


The most common input method on Japanese smartphones is also a 12-key keyboard modeled after feature phones, since it has the lucky coincidence that it maps onto the Japanese phonetic system perfectly - あかさたなはまやらわ+modifiers. On feature phones you had to multi-tap to get from あ to い to う, but on a touchscreen they added "flicking" into different directions to jump directly to a character. Once you get used to it, you can get really fast at it!

Animated demonstration: https://media.giphy.com/media/gjOWCOlhd98wI4dYcd/giphy.gif


> odd that for touchscreen phones we just decided to grab the near exact keyboard layout we use with physical keyboards, and just stick them on a tiny touchscreen

An anecdote: Early in Steam's controller support, they used a really nice alternative keyboard, where you picked one of 8 directions with the analog stick, and pressed a face key for the specific letter. It was fast, convenient, and built for controllers.

It didn't last.

Steam shortly moved back to a standard QWERTY keyboard layout with the joysticks moving virtual fingers. If I had to speculate, I'd say that they received too much negative feedback, because people didn't immediately recognize it as a keyboard, and didn't want to learn something new.

Even if it's slower, virtual QWERTY keyboards are (almost) universally familiar, and there's nothing new to learn.


Phones (at least android ones, don't know about apple ones) allow you to change your keyboard and there are all kind of keyboards. I was using a "swipe" keyboard before, looks (and can work) similar to a normal keyboard but you could also swipe your finger over the keys you want to type without raising your finger and it was doing a pretty good job at predicting what you wanted to type. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a virtual version of the keyboard that OP is using

I think a qwerty keyboard makes sense as a default since that is what people used to and it is hard to teach people new things. But there are alternatives for people wants to try them


How do you know who you can trust? When all apps (including keyboards, I assume) get Internet access by default, I am very reluctant to try any third party keyboard at all.


Apple support custom soft keyboards now too :)


A version of the most popular input method for japanese, adapted to latin, seems suitable: the layout is your good ol' feature phone numpad, but instead of tapping 1 2x to input b and 3x to input c, swipe left on that key for b and up to input c instead, etc.

With Latin's smaller alphabet, you can even have the best of both predictive text and precise input: maybe have the plain tap on 1 be a wildcard (a|b|c) for the predictive engine to infer


> grab the near exact keyboard layout we use with physical keyboards, and just stick them on a tiny touchscreen

Add to that the sad story of the QWERTY layout: proven to be inefficient and yet still widespread.




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