8pen Reinvents the Keyboard For Mobile Devices

An anonymous reader submitted linkage to a company called 8pen that has a new take on one-handed input. I've attached the video if you click the link below, but it's a strange idea using outward spreading swipes that somewhat mimics handwriting. It ships for Android tomorrow, but even if you don't want to try it out, it's an interesting idea for anyone who is tired of finger tapping on a tiny screen.

Learning curve?

[acnicklas]

My parent's generation is still trying to figure out 3-3-3 for F, despite having an alpha-numeric keypad since the days of rotary phones. How are they supposed to learn this?

More keyboards

[muppetman462]

All these different types of keyboards for the android devices are making my head spin. Next it will be brain waves to text! I'll stick with SwipeIT, thank you very much....

Future steps

[BRSloth]

You know, you could add a pen to the device, so you don't have to deal with, say, something that makes it hard to swipe your finger across the screen and reduce the grease in the screen.

Then, after that, you could make the movements more like handwritting, since people are used to that.

Then, maybe, to help people write things faster, put split areas for letters and numbers.

You know, I think I saw that somewhere else before....

Palm recognition

[CAIMLAS]

This seems like a bit of an awkward kludge - capacitive touchscreens are evidently not terribly well suited to such precise inputs.

It's been about 10 years since I've regularly used a Palm Pilot. Handwriting recognition on those devices Worked. I could get quite consistent input, at roughly the same speed as I could writing by hand.

To this day, my written "T" still looks like a "7" on occasion. It felt quite natural and, as far as I know, no handwriting mechanism has come close to rivaling it for effectiveness/consistency.

Do the WebOS devices still have this capability?

Re:Red, Yellow, Green, Blue? What?

[Yvan256]

The Android logo is a green robot...

The Chrome logo looks like Samus in morph ball mode.

Simon says blue-blue-red-green-yellow-green-yellow-blue-red.

Re:Learning curve?

[Wiarumas]

Forget the parents - I'm thinking to myself, how long is it going to take ME to learn this to the point where it is competitively fast as chicken pecking a QWERTY.

Re:Not a great implementation

[Anonymous Coward]

We will go from qwerty to voice.

Hell if I'm going to be composing my text messages by voice in public; at that point, I would just.... you know... give the person a fucking call.

Re:An Anonymous Reader Submitted This??

[DIplomatic]

What....??? ....I .... Wait.... Are you saying that a Slashdot news story covered.... an innovative piece of software that isn't free??? Well I never! This will not stand! Slashdot, I hereby tender my resignation, effective immediately!

Re:Learning curve?

[brainboyz]

I think when compared to the size of the keyboard when in vertical screen mode, it might be quick. May not be competitive with the horizontal layout for a while, but won't be hard to beat vertical.

Re:More keyboards

[poetmatt]

while swype is nice, I think this (8pen) reflects on the fact that the original qwerty keyboard isn't necessarily the best layout in town or the worst, and that maybe it's time people start looking into full on alternatives.

I'm not saying Dvorak, but since we can rearrange keys by choice, maybe it's time people look for something that might work better.

Re:Future steps

[shadowrat]

Graffiti was great. I still think it was the best input system for screen based devices. Once you learned it, i think speed an accuracy were far superior to todays soft keyboards and natural handwriting recognition. The palms also had this fun game to help you learn it. After a couple days of playing that game where letters fell down the screen, i was a pro.

I was going to post about how graffiti was the best ever and 8pen probably sucks, but after watching the video, i think i'm kind of intrigued by it. It actually looks like it would work well and, much like graffiti, is based around a set of unambiguous gestures with well defined start and end points.

It also looks like it's engineered to work well with a touch screen. Yeah, i appreciate the accuracy of a stylus for drawing, but really, why require a little stick that gets lost or broken easily when you can come up with a perfectly efficient means of data entry that utilizes just the device and the user?

I'm actually a little bummed that i won't see it on my iphone anytime soon.

Re:The new Dvorak

[hrvatska]

It would be cool if you could program where the characters were along the different axises. That way people could customize it for their preferences.

Re:Interesting

[Asmor]

The issue with swype is that, no matter how good you get at it, you still have to pay attention to the screen.

With this, you could type without looking at the screen, finally allowing smartphone owners to text and drive as efficiently as the luddites with their old-school keypads. ;)

Re:Not a great implementation

[CynicTheHedgehog]

Why would you have to memorize anything? In the video they have a very cool animation where the letters are magnified as the finger moves. Presumably the same kind of interface could be (or has been) developed to aid in memorizing the gestures. I absolutely cannot stand virtual touch keyboards on mobile devices--this on the other hand would actually make me consider a touch-screen device. (I currently have a e71x with a tiny little physical qwerty keyboard that I can almost tolerate.)

size of highlight

[Anonymous Coward]

The size of the highlighted letter is too small with all that free space they need to make it pop huge. It should obviously appear in the center since that is the only place your finger won't go.