8pen Reinvents the Keyboard For Mobile Devices 214
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.
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me a bit of Swype [swypeinc.com] though watching the video, it seems like it would be slower than Swype.
I'll probably try it out though. My anticipation is that I would need to learn the positions of all the letters to know how many sectors to cover for each. Counting them on the fly would really slow it down. And then there would be those words I'd hate because they involved lots of swirls. Like how we hated people with 9s in their phone numbers during the days of rotary phones.
add it to the bin of failed input methods (Score:1, Interesting)
seems pretty neat but so did the rest at the time
T9 (how many years development? and still everyone turns it off)
Swype
Gestures
Dasher
etc etc
and still blackberries et al still have a qwerty input method
somebody needs to update the famous slashdot spam template "your post advocates..." but for input methods
The new Dvorak (Score:1, Interesting)
Are those letter positions optimal? The scheme feels nice, but I'm not sure if the letter positions are as good as they could be.
Wrong adjective. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Learning curve? (Score:1, Interesting)
Did the letters exist on rotary phones? I thought that came with touchtone phones. At any rate the importance of that system greatly increased in the last 10 years vs "1-800-FREE CAR" type numbers being the only use previously.
Re:Palm recognition (Score:1, Interesting)
ACCESS released an android IME for the old palm graffiti. I've used it and it might just work if i could find a damn capacitive stylus that didnt suck.
Good!Now, put it at the back of my device, please. (Score:2, Interesting)
If someone comes up with a device that uses something like this - but with the input at the back of the device - I'm sold. Just make some dints and bumps so that my finger knows where it is.