Friday, October 22, 2010

AlphaUi Back Type



I don't really know what to make of this one. It's fun that people are breaking with tradition. Real buttons perform better than touch screens and I'm sure expert users can write faster with fewer errors on this device, than say a touch screen with the same size. So, if you're a secretary taking notes for a boss that walks around a lot, maybe this is something for you.

For the rest of us, having to learn a new keyboard layout is just too much to ask. Most of us know the alphabet as one long row, and when you break it up into three rows we have genuine difficulties finding characters. That's why alphabetic layouts fail.

Frequency based layouts, where you have the most common characters in the middle fail for another reason. Coming from Sweden, I typically switch a lot between writing in Swedish and English. If I had two different layouts I would make mistakes all the time. The same is increasingly true in many other places as english is becoming the de facto world standard language.


AlphaUi

1 comment:

Antoine said...

Well, this does make sense. Not usre that it would be the best case of using space on many mob devices, but for some tablets it could make sense. I wonder if this would have been better if it were a haptic screen on the rear instead of mechanical buttons. The device is really too large for anything except for tablet-type usage scenarios.