Learning two keyboard layouts is way more aggravating than using the one your used to, even if you kinda-sorta know how the second layout looks. After spending thirty years with the E key third from the left, top row, I want it right where it always is regardless of how I’m punching the keys.
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For me, it was like learning the qwerty layout over again, although I am a fast touch typist. Contrasted with (for example) thevirtual keyboard on the WDTV, which is arranged alphabetically, I was slowed down a lot more, by virtue of “zxcvbnm” being a much less familiar sequence than “tuvwxyz.”
I guess I have overestimated the tendency of this sort of thing to be left to muscle memory. Type for a few decades without looking at your fingers and this information gets abstracted from the visual vortex; it’s a brand new learning exercise.
No, the QWERTY layout was optimized to reduce jamming of metal type. They put the most frequent letters in the most hard-to-reach positions to slow down the typist and prevent two pits of metal from slamming against the page at the same time.
Thus, it was technologically obsolete for any keyboard that wasn’t designed to control swinging metal arms slamming bits of metal against a page.
The reason the QWERTY layout was kept for smartphones is the same reason that it was kept for computers.
I don’t have any devices with mini-QWERTY or mini-ABCDE keyboards, but I don’t get the difficulty of learning the latter. How different is it, really, from figuring out where the letters are when texting on a standard 12-key cell phone?
I am a young touch typist who has never hunt-pecked on a keyboard. I took keyboarding when I was in the 6th grade and have been an avid typist ever since. But a miniaturized QWERTY keyboard is definitely the way to go. I’ve tried to use an alphabetical layout before in certain situations and I am much, much slower.
It’s really not much different from figuring out where the letters are when texting on a 12-key phone. So, you DO get the difficulty.
Every new and different layout requires some difficulty to learn. The only reason I can think of for additional keyboard designs would be if one was technically superior - better suited to human hands and letter patterns in words, perhaps, or better suited to fitting widely spaced keys into a small touchpad. QWERTY is appealing just because it is the best known.
I would expect that straight alphabetic is in some sense better ‘known’ than qwerty - that if you took a pool of people who had not previously used micro keyboards and presented them with 27 blank keys arranged in three rows, most people would be quicker at intuiting approximately where a letter would fall in an alphabetical arrangement than in Qwerty.
The alphabetical sequence is reinforced daily through any number of.other activities.
I may have overestimated the tendency of touch typists to not really store the arrangement of keys in an easily acessible way.
For my part, using a tiny qwerty keyboard threw me back to the late seventies for a bit. “Wait, where’s ‘n’ again?” I figured this was likely similar for most people who are used to touch typing., and so it seems like a bad choice to me.
Once again, flummoxed by the expectation that my brain processes are typical.
While I know the alphabet in order, it’s completely different from knowing how it would be laid out on a keyboard. I may not have perfect memory of how QWERTY is laid out, but I know the general area of every letter and symbol, so I can find it quickly.
On the other hand, the alphabet may be in different numbers of rows, with different numbers of letters in each row. In video games that make you select a letter using a cursor, the layout is often alphabetical. I frequently catch myself having to stop and think for a split second about the letters near the edges. I’ll actually scoot my cursor to the end of the row before realizing that the next letter is on the next row.
I wonder if you overestimate the ease of use of an alphabetic keyboard, even for yourself. Plus, what would you do about punctuation?
But seriously though, the youngsters have an edge over us geezers. Have any of you ever seen some “up-n-comer” on a chat show go “Oh I’mma totally tweet this” and the host is like “When?” and they’re all “I just DID!”
I’m 40 years old and it takes me 20 minutes to post “I’m at Chili’s” to my Facebook.