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What's faster: qwerty, ABCDE, or T9? Keyboard wars!

It is apparently a "breakthrough" to produce a mobile phone which has nearly 50 keys on, instead of just the 12 numeric keys of the normal dial. It even warrants an award for Most Innovative Keyboard for a Mobile Device at the Outlook 4Mobility Annual Comdex Wireless Dinner. Hm ...

The innovation comes from Digit Wireless - it's given more due praise in various reports from Comdex. "It could soon be a lot easier to tap out messages and use websites via your mobile phone. Next year could see the appearance of mobile phones that have a redesigned keypad that gives each letter and number its own key."

The trick is to take the normal numeric keypad, exactly as it is - and then introduce a slight design change. Instead of the numbers standing above the surrounding area, they're sunk. And at each corner of the slightly recessed number, is a slightly raised corner key, with a letter on it.

If you press just the corner, the appropriate letter appears on screen. If you press the centre - even if you also touch a corner or two - then the electronics picks up the number. Apparently, it works pretty well - and it certainly has to be admitted that devices like Orange's SPV phone fall down badly on this. People with broad fingers can't press a single button on the SPV; they can manage quite well with the Digit Wireless design.

But the "Most Innovative Keyboard" award doesn't just imply that fat fingers are liberated. The award-givers - Andrew Seybold's Outlook 4Mobility - have a host of quotes from enthusiastic industry observers, most of which say: "triple -press is dead!" or "No more predictive text!" and "No more Graffiti!"

Such comments tell us more about the industry observers, frankly, than about the technology.

In the real world, of course, there is a whole generation of sharp-eyed kids who are so used to mobile phone texting that they can actually enter whole sentences via triple-press and Tegic with their hands under the table so that their parents can't see what they're doing.

Nonetheless, it's almost certainly right that if someone found a better way of entering text, faster, more accurately, people would use it. The problem is whether this really is a better way.

The example above - despite the enthusiasm of the Comdex dinner givers - is, when all is said and done, another alphanumeric keyboard, with the alpha keys in alphabetical order. People often think this would be a good idea, and yet somehow, however often this keyboard is invented, other layouts persist. I think the first alphanumeric keypad I saw was on a Sharp IQ personal organiser well over ten years ago. People did manage to use it, but it didn't catch on - and when Psion did something similar on its original Organiser, it equally failed to become a standard. Thos who loved it, loved it - and still do! The rest of the world preferred almost anything else, and when Psion launched its Series 3 it went for QWERTY layout.

Digit Wireless can, of course, produce a QWERTY keyboard, too. Indeed, it has a very pretty looking variant, smaller than a credit card.

And it's worth betting, even before we get to see one, that this works better than some, because of Digit Wireless's clever electronic sensing.

But does this really mean the end of predictive text or even triple-press?

Edward de Bono, inventor of "Lateral Thinking" used to set a test for children, and it was designed to illustrate something odd about human beings and their approach to problems.

The test was to cross a room without touching the floor - quickest across wins. He'd draw a line on each side of the room, and then he'd give the kids some equipment, and let them work it out. First, he'd give each kid two planks, and two ropes. In no time, the kids would all have the ropes tied to the planks, and would stand on the planks, holding the ropes and thus, walking across the floor without touching it, the first kid to the other side would win.

And he'd time them.

For the next test, he'd draw the same two lines, and set the same target. But instead of two planks and two ropes each, the kids got one plank and one rope. After it was explained that it was NOT all right to take a plank and a rope from another kid by force, the kids pretty rapidly twigged that you could still do it. You stand on one plank with both feet; and you hold the rope, and you jump!

Here's the interesting thing: the slowest kid across, jumping, was quicker than the fastest kid across, walking.

Logically, therefore, if you gave the kids two planks and they wanted to win, they should start by discarding one plank and one rope. But they never did ...

Strangely, the same logic applies to keyboards. Less is more.

The first time I saw the Orange SPV phone and discovered it had no touch-sensitive screen, no pen input, no mouse, and only 12 keypad keys, I felt something close to rage. I couldn't DO ANYTHING to it. It felt as if there was a barrier between me and the machine. I prepared to hate it.

I'm no sharp-eyed kid, either; I expected to find the display unreadable. And when it came to the point where I had to test its email facilities, my anger rose to the level of panic; how on earth was I supposed to put an "@" sign into this wretched thing?

But the learning curve is steep. You learn quickly, in other words (why do people always get this back to front?) and come rapidly down the curve. After just a couple of SMS messages, you're getting the idea of predictive text; you just type the words and the software works out which one you mean. Switching from Tegic to triple-press and back again isn't easy - not at first. But you quickly get the idea. And switching to odd characters of the sort you need in www.thisandthat.com/~things.htm is a pain - but it's a pain on a full typewriter keyboard, too.

And after a day of it, it suddenly dawns on you. You're actually entering data faster with this, than you would on a full qwerty layout, and faster than a Graffiti input, and definitely faster than a handwriting recogniser and much faster than an alphabetical-order keyboard. The fact is, if you only have 12 keys to choose from, you can find the one you want quicker.

Of course, you do make mistakes, and so does Tegic predictive text. Again, there are easy fixes for that. Yes, you have to check the manual at first, and yes, it's a pain at first; but if you actually use the thing, your mind has no trouble adjusting. And it's actually fast!

Clever alternate keyboards are not a discovery of Tegic - they go back years. For example, the Quinkey system - invented by film producer Cy Endfield - uses "chording" where you take five keys, and hit combinations of them. Different combinations produce different letters and it is absolutely true that most people, if forced to learn to use this device, find they pick it up quicker than QWERTY for the first time. And it is pretty quick.

I remember meeting Endfield in an airport departure lounge in LA, when we were both en route to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show one year; I had a QWERTY based Tandy model 100 on which I proceeded to interview him. He had his Microwriter - a Quinkey device - with which he proceeded to make his own copy of the interview. I type pretty fast! - around 115 words a minute - and he was nearly matching me.

His wasn't the only chording keyboard; there is the BAT keyboard - $200 - on the market too. I've never tried it, but I'll bet it works.

There are other, dafter-looking devices around. For the genuinely one-handed typist, the Half-Qwerty concept takes a full QWERTY keyboard and lets you use half of it for both sides. Or you can try to get a look at the Hand-Son (hands-on, geddit?) half keyboard - I haven't managed to do so yet.

There was also the Half Keyboard; tiny, and genuinely one-handed - and some really liked it while others found it confusing. But again, you can't hold it and the PDA in the same hand and do any work. Even IBM - which came out with a half keyboard design in 1997 couldn't make it useable with a single hand, the way Tegic is. You still need one hand to hold it, and the other to push the buttons.

If you want to get even stranger, there were freaks, like Steve Roberts's "BEHEMOTH" recumbent bike which introduced mobile/wireless computing - he fitted eight switches to the handlebars, and learned a hex code which enabled him to enter every character in the Ascii table while pedalling around America. Wrote a whole book - "Computing Across America" with it, too! Note: not recommended for mobile phone or PDA use ... BEHEMOTH became an acronym: Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine ... Only Too Heavy.

The obsession with full qwerty keyboards, however, will continue, because they are familiar.Foldable keyboards, half-size ones, thumb size. Which is really odd. When you get something like the Logitech wrap-around soft keyboard for the Palm (and a similar device was ready to go with the Sendo SmartPhone before it was canned!) the first response is: "Wow! a proper keyboard!" - and yet, when I first started writing about personal computers in 1977, they were dismissed as a wild fancy, "because no executive will ever demean himself by learning to use a typewriter keyboard!" And of course, they are all a disappointment, in the end; you can't use them standing up. You can't use them with the hand you are using to hold the device, perhaps, puts it better.

Tegic, however, allows this.

I don't doubt that Digit Wireless has a breakthrough, of some kind, with its soft roll-over system. It could make ordinary keyboard design on small form factors easier, and keyboards more friendly. But the fact remains that you have 50-odd keys on a full keyboard, and nobody yet has worked out a way of touch typing on a Psion or on a Treo thumb-board.

But you can easily enter text, rapidly and accurately, on a Tegic phone, by feel alone.

The award to Digit Wireless says: "Digit Wireless was recognized for the most innovative keyboard for a mobile device: Digit Wireless's Fastap technology integrates an alphanumeric keyboard in the same space taken up by a standard wireless phone's numeric keypad. This novel design/implementation enables wireless phone users to enter text faster and easier than using traditional triple-tap or predictive methods."

Frankly, I doubt this is true. Possibly, it's true that if you sit down at a Tegic keyboard for the first time, you go slower than when you sit down with a Fastap keyboard for the first time. But after a day, I'd bet the Tegic user will be way around ahead. When something is new, there is always resistance. Tegic is still new to most people I talk to; they don't even know what it is. But it is now built into most phones, and those who use it, like it. And it is faster than Graffiti, faster than two-thumbs qwerty, and most definitely, faster than alphabetic-order keypads.