Yet another keypad idea

OJW openmoko at blibbleblobble.co.uk
Sat Sep 8 15:01:23 CEST 2007


On Saturday 08 September 2007 13:44, Thomas Gstädtner wrote:
> Interesting concept, but I can't see an advantage to the standard numeric
> keypads.
> Maybe you can enlighten me? :)

Compared to the standard "444 for I, 7777 for S"-type of keypad, it's ease of 
learning/remembering the keystrokes (based on visual shapes of the letters, 
rather than arbitrarily splitting-up the alphabet).  Maybe it's only me who 
has difficulty remembering those without looking at the keypad.

Compared to predictive text input, it works with source-code, symbols, names, 
bash commands etc., i.e. anything that's not prose text.

So for complex input, it might beat T9 because you don't need to change 
keyboards every time you want a symbol or a number.

It also doesn't need a display like predictive text, since you don't need to 
display and choose between alternate completions. (hence the possibility of a 
completely transparent keyboard)

I'll try adding a characters-per-minute to the page (or someone else could -- 
it's only javascript)






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