Half Keyboards
from the different dept
As people try to figure out better input devices for PDAs and cell phones, they tend to go with some well known solutions: smaller keyboards, touchscreens, and even voice recognition. Well, here’s a slightly different idea. It is a smaller keyboard, but it’s not that the keys are smaller, but there are fewer of them. It’s called the “Half Keyboard” for obvious reasons, and apparently half of the letters of the alphabet have to be typed while holding the space bar. I’m not convinced that this is really that elegant of a solution and sounds more annoying to me than anything else. Also, the estimated price of $250 is a bit steep if they really want to get this thing out to market. There already are fold up keyboards for palm devices that are much cheaper.
Comments on “Half Keyboards”
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Half keyboards sound crappy to me! I wouln’t buy one!
As input device guru...
half keyboards are nothing new. Stenographers have had such kind of devices for decades. You just have to be willing to learn “chords” where you press several keys at once to get different characters. But how many people are actually willing to learn another touch-typing set? How well has DVORAK infiltrated the market? QWERTY was actually designed to SLOW DOWN typing speeds so that old-school typewriters wouldn’t get jammed! So of course there are better keyboards out there… The real question is: what’s BETTER than the keyboard? Or is the keyboard (or software-modified “smart” keyboards) the best we can hope for? I tend to think that we’ll never get rid of the keyboard…. But that’s probably a good thing.