The post-keyboard era?

**_StephenBB81** · 06-23-2012, 03:02 PM

Originally Posted by ubizmo

This is an interesting point. I know that there are people who swear by the SureType keyboard, and would like to see it on a virtual keyboard. I never used it, so I can't comment, but it makes me wonder. SureType was itself designed to make the most of a telephone keypad for text entry, in a way more efficient than T9. It does seem that the very thing that made it useful on a telephone numeric keypad would make it useful on a virtual keyboard: fewer keys to be squeezed onto the screen for a correspondingly more forgiving typing experience.

I wonder how many people would use virtual SureType, if BB10 were to offer it as an option (which I don't expect).

Edit: I guess Kevin already asked this question a few months ago: http://crackberry.com/crackberry-ask...erry-10-phones

Not even the SureType keyboard (which I too know some people who LOVED it, I was never fast on it)

but for example

The vertical centre of the thumb based keyboard is the easiest place to reach when typing where on the traditional qwerty keyboard your home row is horizontally based

currently on the BlackBerry the most crossed keys are TGV, YHB. which more appropriately should be ETA IRO based on frequency of those letters used that would dramatically decrease typing time if the keyboard was build from the centre out with frequent letters positions for ease of pushing with 2 thumbs

And really we are now in a time that company's could introduce such keyboard changes, the desktop keyboard is being used less and more people are learning to typing on phones before computers so the change and "retraining" factor that came about in the QWERTY vs Dvorak days wouldn't be a factor.

**ubizmo** · 06-23-2012, 03:09 PM

Originally Posted by deRusett

you don't consider 5" Plus "phones" bluring those lines between phone and tablet, and then tablet and laptop

Think of it this way. What's a full-sized keyboard good for anyway? Touch typing, i.e., typing using all fingers without having to look at the keys. For hunt-and-peck typing, the size of the keyboard is less relevant, because you don't have to hover your fingers over the keys. Thumb typing is just a variation on hunt-and-peck.

To me, the boundary between tablet and laptop is at the point where there can be a keyboard large enough for touch typing. The slabs like the Galaxy Note may blur the line between phone and tablet, but they don't approach the laptop threshold.

This threshold is less important for people who don't touch type. I would never buy a keyboard case for my PB, since doing so would turn it into something just as frustrating as my old netbook. For a hunt-and- it might be different.

**_StephenBB81** · 06-23-2012, 03:21 PM

Originally Posted by ubizmo

Think of it this way. What's a full-sized keyboard good for anyway? Touch typing, i.e., typing using all fingers without having to look at the keys. For hunt-and-peck typing, the size of the keyboard is less relevant, because you don't have to hover your fingers over the keys. Thumb typing is just a variation on hunt-and-peck.

To me, the boundary between tablet and laptop is at the point where there can be a keyboard large enough for touch typing. The slabs like the Galaxy Note may blur the line between phone and tablet, but they don't approach the laptop threshold.

This threshold is less important for people who don't touch type. I would never buy a keyboard case for my PB, since doing so would turn it into something just as frustrating as my old netbook. For a hunt-and-peck it might be different.

I agree I wouldn't buy a keyboard case unless I could get a keyboard case that gave me a 12" wide keyboard and held my PlayBook in portrait mode in the centre of the case.

as for touch typing, I'd say I am a touch typer on my BB as much as I am on my laptop, and in my age bracket I see more touch typers on their phones than on their PC's
Touch typing is typing without needing to look at the key's or the device itself, which again is easier when only needing to control 2 digits as apposed to 10 ( in my case 8 I've never incorporated my "pinky" finger into the bulk of my typing needs

**ubizmo** · 06-23-2012, 03:59 PM

Originally Posted by deRusett

Touch typing is typing without needing to look at the key's or the device itself, which again is easier when only needing to control 2 digits as apposed to 10 ( in my case 8 I've never incorporated my "pinky" finger into the bulk of my typing needs

At a real keyboard, the only unemployed digit is my left thumb, just the way Miss Gagnon, my 9th grade typing teacher, insisted. And after the first few weeks, we spent the rest of the term with a sheet of note paper taped to the typewriter, covering our hands and the keyboard, so we couldn't see anything even if we peeked. So in that sense I'm a touch typist on any qwerty device, whether the keyboard is hard or virtual.

This is also what makes me a touch Swypist. I don't have to look at the virtual keyboard at all to Swype words. The locations of those letters are branded into my brain, so I can zoom my finger around pretty recklessly and still get it right.

When I type on my BB, with my bank of auto-text abbreviations, I'm looking at the text on the screen, never at my thumbs. The same is true when I Swype in Android.

I have big hands, and of course big thumbs. But I can handle the BB keyboard pretty nimbly. The transition from the luxurious keyboard of the SideKick LX to the BB 8320 took a few days, until I learned to find the rounded surface of the BB keys with the specific spot on my thumb, then all was well. Thumb-typing on a virtual keyboard hasn't gone so well for me, since there's no place on the glass for my thumb to "find" in a tactile way. Haptic feedback after I press a letter is no good; I want feedback just before I press. This absence of feedback causes my thumbs to quiver a bit when typing on a virtual keyboard, in a way that never happens on the BB hard keyboard. Even after several months using the HTC Radar, I couldn't thumb-type reliably on it. I had to use just my index finger, which is indeed tedious.

This is why Swype was such a game-changer for me. I still have to hold the device in my left hand and "type" with one finger, but the "typing" involves a continuous fluid motion, with very little pecking.

There is one Android keyboard called "TouchPal", which I used for a while. It's similar to Swype, and used to be more accurate, but Swype has now overtaken it, I believe. But TouchPal has another interesting feature: To get the special symbols associated with various letters, you swipe up on those letters. No shift/alt key needed. It's a tiny detail, but an interesting innovation in terms of keeping the flow of text entry going.

Getting text into the device is one of the fundamental human-machine interactions. The strength of the all-screen device is that it has the power to offer the user more than a single way to do this interaction. Android has taken advantage of this by allowing alternate input methods as apps. WP has not; it's their stock keyboard or the highway. I'm not sure about iPhone.

In my opinion, RIM should take a hint from Android on this point. The more options users have for doing text entry, the less reason they have to insist on a physical keyboard.

**Tre Lawrence** · 06-23-2012, 04:25 PM

^^^^ Swype was a game-changer for me as well. As I said earlier, I probably would not have tried a new platform had I not had the extensive practice time on Swype. And it just keeps on getting better; I just deleted stock Swype so that I could use the beta.

Love Swype...

**jthep** · 06-23-2012, 10:18 PM

Originally Posted by Rickroller

Did you also type "bc" instead of "because" due to it being tedious?

Because touch screens don't feel right to you, no one else should be able to use them proficiently, right? As i've shown in some screenshots i've already posted, I can type about 70-90wpm on my touchscreen. If that's not proficient, then i'm curious to know what is..

That is proficient, but not everyone is you. Shouldn't people be able to choose between all touch devices and devices that have a real physical keyboard? It seems almost like fascism to make everyone use a touch keyboard like the title of this thread suggests!

I will never like typing on a touch screen, to me it just doesn't feel right. Thats me, more and more people adopt all touch devices that at this point are starting to look pretty silly getting almost as big as tablets.

I am starting to think RIM had a great idea but poorly executed it or even advertised the tablet/phone bridge app combo. What do I mean by that? Tablet that shares a data plan with a phone with no extra data fees and can use the qwerty keyboard on the phone through a remote control function. So rather turning a tablet into a laptop/netbook by purchasing a large bluetooth keyboard to make it far too bulky, use your phone's qwerty keyboard.

As tablets become more and more mainstream along with smartphones, could we see a future where people go back to qwerty smartphones to pair with tablets and type on them? I dunno, maybe, maybe not. I think such functions make a lot of sense, but most people don't currently seem to think so.

So rather than phones becoming tablets, I would like to see qwerty phones become the bluetooth keyboards for tablets, but that would make entirely too much sense and the smartphone consumer would rather worry about quad core processors that so far have proven to add nothing to a smartphone (yet!) or the ability to watch Netflix on a phone or carrying a phone they can't even fit in their pockets anymore!?!?!

**lengend** · 06-23-2012, 11:52 PM

I'm a 9900 owner and a former 9700 owner and I am getting the BB10 all touch device and actually don't plan getting the QWERTY version of BB10.

I prefer having the bigger screen and need a bigger one cause I like to browse the net a lot. I feel my 9900 screen is to small. But I also believe the bb10 touch keyboard will be very good and I might be on par with my 9900 typing skills.

**belfastdispatcher** · 06-24-2012, 02:59 AM

One often overlooked advantage of the 9900 is when taking photos with just one hand, thumb over the trackpad, you can snap away easy.

This was apparent in a recent trip to the museum where you would see a lot of parents taking photos of their kids near some dinosaurs. Android and iphone owners made it look very awkward, using two hands and then taking the shot with the index finger.

When you saw an outstretched hand you knew there was a Blackberry at the end of it lol.

It would be slightly easier for full touch phones if you held it upright but that gives you just a small strip of a photo in the middle of the computer screen.

**Laura Knotek** · 06-24-2012, 04:45 AM

It might sound weird, but I actually find it easier to take pictures with two hands. It is even easier for me to take pictures using a real DSLR, rather than any phone, due to the extra weight and means of stabilization by putting one hand under the lens.

I learned photography on an all manual 35-mm SLR, though.

Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express

**belfastdispatcher** · 06-24-2012, 04:49 AM

Originally Posted by lak611

It might sound weird, but I actually find it easier to take pictures with two hands. It is even easier for me to take pictures using a real DSLR, rather than any phone, due to the extra weight and means of stabilization by putting one hand under the lens.

I learned photography on an all manual 35-mm SLR, though.

Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express

Lol, not when you have only one hand available.

**MartyMcfly** · 06-24-2012, 04:57 AM

Originally Posted by belfastdispatcher

One often overlooked advantage of the 9900 is when taking photos with just one hand, thumb over the trackpad, you can snap away easy.

This was apparent in a recent trip to the museum where you would see a lot of parents taking photos of their kids near some dinosaurs. Android and iphone owners made it look very awkward, using two hands and then taking the shot with the index finger.

When you saw an outstretched hand you knew there was a Blackberry at the end of it lol.

It would be slightly easier for full touch phones if you held it upright but that gives you just a small strip of a photo in the middle of the computer screen.

Hmm, sounds like the iPhone users didn't know that you could use one of the side buttons to capture the photo. Lol

Sent from my New iPad using Tapatalk

**belfastdispatcher** · 06-24-2012, 05:04 AM

Originally Posted by MartyMcfly

Hmm, sounds like the iPhone users didn't know that you could use one of the side buttons to capture the photo. Lol

Sent from my New iPad using Tapatalk

You know thats not the same thing, try zooming in and out, then come back and report.

**Laura Knotek** · 06-24-2012, 05:11 AM

I don't carry bags or kids (don't have kids), so both hands are always free to take pictures.

Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express

**MartyMcfly** · 06-24-2012, 05:13 AM

Originally Posted by belfastdispatcher

You know thats not the same thing, try zooming in and out, then come back and report.

Its not that hard my friend...I don't find it easier using the bold...*shrugs*

since i was a young tyke-u
tried to moon walk like michael
i understood the universal cycles
positive negative neutral

**ubizmo** · 06-24-2012, 05:13 AM

Originally Posted by jthep

That is proficient, but not everyone is you. Shouldn't people be able to choose between all touch devices and devices that have a real physical keyboard? It seems almost like fascism to make everyone use a touch keyboard like the title of this thread suggests!

This topic isn't about whether hard keyboards should go away. It's about whether they are going away. I think the answer is yes but I certainly don't want to see them go away.

**belfastdispatcher** · 06-24-2012, 05:13 AM

Originally Posted by lak611

I don't carry bags or kids (don't have kids), so both hands are always free to take pictures.

Sent from my Lumia 900 using Board Express

Then you are not most people lol, i posted a video recently on the 9900 forum and that was taken with a kid on my shoulders and another holding on to my left hand .

**ubizmo** · 06-24-2012, 05:17 AM

Originally Posted by belfastdispatcher

You know thats not the same thing, try zooming in and out, then come back and report.

I also tend to use the keyboard to snap the actual photo, by pressing the return key. I find that this shakes the phone less than tapping the screen.

**belfastdispatcher** · 06-24-2012, 05:20 AM

Originally Posted by MartyMcfly

Its not that hard my friend...I don't find it easier using the bold...*shrugs*

since i was a young tyke-u
tried to moon walk like michael
i understood the universal cycles
positive negative neutral

Please describe to me how you use the iphone camera with one hand for zooming in and out sideways, not upright. Upright photos don't look good on a computer screen.

I hold it in my right hand, thumb over the trackpad, swipe up to zoom in, swipe down to zoom out, press the trackpad when ready to shoot. Easy.

**belfastdispatcher** · 06-24-2012, 05:23 AM

Originally Posted by ubizmo

I also tend to use the keyboard to snap the actual photo, by pressing the return key. I find that this shakes the phone less than tapping the screen.

Lol, why not the trackpad?

**MartyMcfly** · 06-24-2012, 05:31 AM

Originally Posted by belfastdispatcher

Please describe to me how you use the iphone camera with one hand for zooming in and out sideways, not upright. Upright photos don't look good on a computer screen.

I hold it in my right hand, thumb over the trackpad, swipe up to zoom in, swipe down to zoom out, press the trackpad when ready to shoot. Easy.

I open the camera app and snap away...I'm lazy, if i have to do a lot of zooming in + out i usually pass on the picture...