Not so long ago the notion of a mobile was far-fetched,
but as the size of the device became smaller, the audience grew substantially
larger, and before we knew it the world was suddenly typing away on a phone -
sometimes at the expense of face-to-face interaction.
Before you know it, typing on a mobile became second
nature - unless you avoided the mobile phone trend. Even now, with smartphones
starting to ebb away at the life of feature phones, the keyboard has changed
but we're typing more than ever, thanks to better signal coverage, faster
hardware and the advent of computer-like functionality such as sending,
receiving and composing emails.
With that in mind, we decided to look at some of the
milestones of typing on mobile phones with a view to seeing where the future of
the thumb-based practice may be heading.
Alphanumeric keypad
Alphanumeric keypads may seem something of history
books, but it's what facilitated the obsession with texting and messaging on
mobiles. Not sure what an alphanumeric keypad is? Take a look at your landline
phone (if you still have one). Bets are, on each number, you'll see letters
too. This is what is known as an alphanumeric keypad and it wasn't the most
effective way of typing long emails, believe us.
The number 2, for instance, had a, b and c assigned to
it: one press for a, two presses for b and three presses for c. If two letters
in sequence were represented with the same number (if you were typing about,
for example), you'd have to pause between them otherwise you would end up
cycling through the same letters again.
As you can imagine, typing out town names in welsh and
character-heavy words would take a fair few presses. But the system was solid
and it didn't take long to memorise the pattern to type out common words, which
meant typing speed could be improved dramatically with practice.
Another benefit was the buttons themselves. Nothing
beats the feel of a button as you know you've pressed it, and you can more
easily work out where one button is in relation to another.
Really nothing could stop the alphanumeric system
during the worldwide rise of the mobile phone, but something was about to
happen that would divide the world: whether you were a predictive texter or
preferred it the old-fashioned way.
T9 predictive text
T9 and its predictive text system was designed to build
upon the older alphanumeric system with the ability to 'predict' what you
wanted to type. This meant you could, in theory, type messages more quickly and
potentially more accurately.
Developed by Tegic Communications, which is now part of
Nuance Communications, T9 allowed you to do away with the multi-tap approach
used above. Instead, you could type the keys 8, 4 then 3 and you would get
'the'. As you were typing it would show up as 't', then 'th' and then 'the' -
as you would expect.
This meant three presses instead of five. Obviously
depending on the word, time could be saved quite dramatically, especially when
your selection of a word meant it would appear again as the top choice.
If multiple words could be gained from your combination
of presses, you could go through all the known permutations to find yours. This
meant a little more time but, as we said above, the algorithm would learn your
word by adding it to its dictionary so you could achieve the same word again
more efficiently.
Eventually smart punctuation was introduced to help you
punctuate your messages with minimal effort, building on top of T9's predictive
nature.
As Qwerty keyboards became more common, largely thanks
to BlackBerry, a variant known as XT9 was introduced.
Qwerty keyboard
That collection of squares and rectangles in front you
right now as you read this, whether physical or digital, really made life a lot
easier, didn't it? Instead of using predictive texting (or alphanumeric if
you're an old-school rebel), you could type on a mobile like you would on a
computer, which meant your phone could perform similar, if not the same tasks
in most cases.
Email, typing text messages, forwarding on a bad joke -
it all became a lot easier with a physical keyboard. But smartphones decided to
move away from the wonders of buttons and into touchscreen keyboards, which
have their size dictated by the width of the screen, whether it's in portrait
or landscape.
Comprised of the same Qwerty layout of a standard
computer keyboard, the first letters from left to right read q, w, e, r, t, y,
and so on. The next line starts slightly to the right and features nine
letters. At the bottom is seven letters, usually surrounded by a shift button
on the left for capitalising letters and delete on the right for backspacing.
Some manufacturers went a little further with the
available buttons. &123 toggles between letters, symbols and even more
symbols. Return acts as a way of paragraphing text. Space, which like on a
keyboard is a longer button so it's easier to press, adds spaces between words.
Sometimes smartphone-specific buttons and functionality
is added to make life even easier. On Android and Windows Phone you can press a
button to access a list of smileys or emoticons. One press of the standard
smiley adds a colon and bracket in succession to save you the task of writing
it out yourself.
While a touchscreen makes life easy for navigation and
using software, whether it's an app or game, the lack of tactile feedback makes
it harder to type because there are more keys to press in a similar or smaller
area, and there's no physical aspect to help guide you.
To compensate, phones have even cleverer software for
predicting words and helping you type. Take Windows Phone, for example. Complex
studies of typing practices means the keyboard can enlarge certain keys at a
moment it deems relevant, helping you avoid mistakes. So for instance, typing t
then h may affect the size of the e key because the word 'the' is common.
As with T9 predictive texting, words can also be stored
on most operating systems and the memory capacity means you could probably add
every word and still have a great deal of space, though, we'll leave the exact
calculations of that for the cleverer people among us.
More impressive computing functionality on the mobile
platform has meant the need for computing interfaces but that hasn't made the
actual job of typing any quicker, you can just do more than you could with
older typing systems.
T9 Keypad
Rather than just accept the norm, some companies
decided to do the entrepreneurial thing and go against the grain. The result is
unique ways to type, and the biggest we know if is Swype.
As the name suggests, this Android-based system of
typing involves swyping out words. So using our example, the word 'the' would
involve swiping your finger across each letter in the word. Disconnecting your
finger from the screen is the signal you are about to start a new word.
Like with former methods, error-correcting algorithms
and a language model both try their best to put down exactly what you want to
say with as little interaction as possible. And it works, because sliding
across words is better on a touchscreen and it only needs a Qwerty keyboard
interface to be applied.
Since its inception on the Windows Mobile-powered
Samsung Omnia II, Swype has been updated to include many languages and
improvements to its accuracy, and users are seemingly getting faster at using
the system. 55 words per minute can be achieved, which is probably a lot
quicker than what you could do on a non-physical touchscreen keyboard.
In fact, 2010 saw a Guiness world record achieved: In a
minute a user reportedly typed 160 characters in 25 words typed in 25.94
seconds - that's about 58 words per minute.
You'd think there is only so much you can do with a
keyboard but there are even more alternatives and one that we may see arrive
comes from Microsoft This curious curved keyboard is designed to enable typing
with one thumb. Its curved nature mimics the curve of reach you have from a
digit.
QWERTY Swype
What's interesting is the QWERTY-style layout looks
like it has been ditched to make way for a more thumb-friendly alphanumeric
type system. Apart from taking a step back to older keypads, it's a system that
tries to remove the complication of modern devices, which we guess is meant to
help ease ex feature phone users when jumping up to smartphones.
It's not immediately clear whether we will see this
keyboard as it's just a screenshot as far as we know. But it's proof there's
still innovation to be had in the text input field.
The future
So where can we go from here? Voice to text is
obviously one big avenue of opportunity and the likes of Dragon Software, Siri
and Google Voice is making headway into turning the dream into a reality.
Of course, this technology has its own limitations,
mainly the issue of composing emails aloud on your commute would be a bit odd,
or if an email was of a private nature. That's not to say you couldn't mix and
match between systems, though.
We can't see the Qwerty system itself being adjusted
any time soon but, like with what Microsoft is doing, it may be adapted. One
clever technology developed by Tactus Technology allows buttons to be created
on a touchscreen as they are needed.
A layer of fluid-filled micro-channels can create
tactile buttons by altering fluid pressure and redirecting the liquid.
Basically, a build up of pressure creates a bubble, which sticks out and so it
can be pressed, like a typical button.
Tactus:Dynamic Physical Buttons on Touch Screens for iPhone on 2013
Tactus CEO Craig Ciesla explained: 'For the first
generation of technology, the position of the buttons are pre-configured in the
factory. But the size, shape, and location can be anywhere on the window - so
we are highly flexible and a design tool with which device and UI designers can
innovate. Future generations will offer individually controllable buttons -
touchable pixels, or Tixels.'
It's not clear whether we will see Tactus Technology's
work any time soon, but we hope we will. It's not something that is trying to
reinvent the wheel but improve on what we already have, and that will be a much
easier pill for consumers to swallow.
It may seem like typing is a fairly overlooked and
often ignored practice, but considering its usefulness we often wonder why this
is the case.
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