>Not to belittle the point, but TENS OF MILLIONS of users across Japan
>and Europe who are phenomenally proficient at inputting on a 1-key is
>not an anomaly.
>Agreed it's not THE solution, but so far it's no worse than a QWERTY
>keyboard (itself a reasonably contested input method) and it's certainly
>the most prolific; there are hundreds of millions of cell phones in the
>world with 10-keys, vastly outnumbering the number of qwerty keyboards
>in the world. That alone might mean that, even though 10-key input isn't
>the best, it is most certainly the most popular, and therefore a defacto
>standard...
yes, but at what?
saying that there are many more 10-keys in the world than qwertys just
says that cell phones are more popular than PCs (which is not surprising,
given that for most people, cell phones are more useful than PCs, and
cost a fraction as much).
Additionally, while many folks input text on a cell phone, most people
use the 10-key for entering numbers, which it does a better job at
(certainly better than qwerty, where number entry is difficult unless
there is a seperate numeric keypad).
10-key seems fine for many people. I have also seen some nice
implementations where the phone has a toggle at the top that reduces
text-entry on a 10-key to a single key entry (2=A, toggle up + 2 =B,
toggle down + 2 = C). Difficult text entry has not seemed to slow down
any of the millions of avid texters in Europe or Asia, and improving text
entry on small devices is *not* going to help them in the US. there are
other, more pressing problems.
but it seems ridiculous to say that qwerty is no better than 10-key for
longer passages. If you take someone who's used qwerty for 100 hrs and
set them against someone who's used 10-key for 100 hrs, and ask them to
write a 10 page essay, the person with qwerty is going to to better. now,
no one should want to use a phone to write a 10 page essay, it's not a
task well suited to that scale. but for short messages, the 10-key seems
fine.
zimran
zimran@creativegood.com
212.736.2075
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Received on Mon Jan 22 18:23:22 2001