News Report #4

Help for Slow Mobile Phone Typists

Cell phones have come a long way from the early late 1990’s when they became popular. Now, practically everyone has a cell phone and cells are being used for much more than just making a typical phone call. Now, people can pay their bills, make dinner reservations, and have a long conversation with their best friend, without even verbally talking to anyone.

Texting has become a huge revolution in communication. People often prefer it because it is fast, and eliminates that extra personal interaction. In fact, I myself much prefer texting my mom as to having a long-winded conversation on the phone. Texting was once a rather slow and tedious process only using the twelve keys on the front of the cell phone, however, in recent years, after to explosion of text messaging, easier, convenient methods of texting are emerging. The QWERTY keyboard boosted the ease in which people could sent texts. It made the process faster and much more precise, but of course, technology is always changing.

Two students, Michael Fester and Volker Schlue, at Cambridge University in England, have created a new method that replaces the keyboard, synonymous among most “texters”. The design is called the 8Pen. This new phone interface contains no keyboard, just a colorful X with a black dot. The letters are placed along the X on each side, but the tricky part is that the letters are not placed in alphabetical order. The students placed the letters using a logical rhythm…they just placed the letters most used first, to make the ease of selecting those letters quicker and much more efficient. The whole process is rather confusing to understand, but the method has been claimed to be much faster, after you get the hang of it..of course.

This is very interesting to me because it shows just how technology evolves. This new method, which seems more complicated than ancient keyboard, will actually prove to be much easier. It is completely different from any typing method currently used, but it focuses on using common logic to create something that better fits out technological needs.  I will definitely be keeping my eye out for the 8Pen.

BILTON, NICK. "8Pen Mobile Keyboard Aims to Speed Up Typing –

NYTimes.com." Technology - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Nov. 2010. <http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/8pen-hopes-to-reinvent-the-mobile-phone-keyboard/?ref=technology>.