QWERTY on a cellphone? - no thank you!
I went to the Computing magazine's awards dinner last week as Microsoft had been nominated for a couple of Technology awards. At each table, one of the main sponsors had placed a BlackBerry so that we could send messages to other tables. I was keen to have a try, and decided to text the next table to see how easy it was.
The BlackBerry has characters arranged in the standard QWERTY style, and I think it's really counter intuitive and difficult to send messages quickly. For a start, I can't get both hands onto the key pad, so I can't touch type, and finding the keys takes ages using just one finger. I've used a Smartphone for a couple of years now, and can effectively respond to emails, or texts using the text keypad and one thumb (The teenagers next door can text messages to their friends with their mobile phones in their pockets but I haven't reached that stage yet).
I was curious as to why the BlackBerry has it's keys arranged in such a way, and did a bit of investigating on the history of the QWERTY design. In 1872, E. Remington & Sons produced the first mechanical typewriter, patented by C. Latham Sholes. Soon typists were going so fast that they were able to jam the keys which flew up to hit the typewriter ribbon. In 1873, Remington set their engineers to work to on the design. One of their keyboard layout changes was driven by a clever marketing idea. The Remington brand name, TYPE WRITER, could be most speedily typed if all of its letters were on the same row. Remington's salesmen used this slight bit of subterfuge to impress potential customers. In the late 1870's: the "improved" QWERTY layout was designed to slow down typing, so that keys would not jam anymore. Here is the speed trap we are stuck with today, 130 years later.
I learnt to touch type at college using the old manual typewriters, and spent many hours tying the asdf jkl; sequence over and over again until my typing speed increased to well over 45wpm (words per minute), I use both hands on the keyboard, and now don't have to look at the keys at all. This has held me in really good stead for working at my laptop ever since. But typing on a BlackBerry? It took me over 5 minutes to type the message to the next table, and I never did get a response..