Keyboards: Still the Key to Success

Even when gadgets get tiny, you can't beat QWERTY.

Contributing Editor & Cohost of PC World's Digital Duo on public TV.

Stephen Manes

I'm creating this column with a nineteenth-century device that requires lengthy, awkward training. So quirky is this thing that even capable users can produce hundreds of errors in an average day; nonetheless, no alternative invented since consistently matches its productivity.

Ladies and gentlemen, salute our friend the real, physical keyboard. And do it while you still can. Lately I've been running into a spate of boneheaded products that are trying to dispense with the old finger-bender entirely.

Take Microsoft's Ultra Mobile PC design--please! This scheme, as seen in Samsung's Q1 and the TabletKiosk Eo, gives you lots of ways to enter text: three incarnations of on-screen, no-tactile-feedback keyboards--two for a stylus and one for your thumbs--plus two modes of character recognition. Each of those methods, to put it politely, sucks. If you want a real keyboard, you can always hook up a USB model and learn to juggle--but you shouldn't have to.

Then there's the even smaller Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It's petite enough to fit inside your pocket, but entering something as essential as a URL involves pointing and tapping on a dysfunctional on-screen keyboard, Or writing the way the device wants you to. Take away a genuine keyboard, and usability is lost.

The same goes for phones that make you enter multiple taps on a keypad or force you to rely on software that tries to guess what a series of single taps means. Suddenly, you find yourself longing for QWERTY--which you can get in a few phones that have slide-out keyboards.

A good keyboard can make the difference between a hit and a flop. The thumb-typing genius of the original BlackBerry helped make that product a household name. And Handspring swiped the idea for its Treo instead of sticking with the Palm OS tradition of requiring users to pick up a stylus and learn special characters. Clever variations include the wider keyboard on T-Mobile's Sidekick.

Keyboards have been less successful on tweener devices--ones a bit bigger than most contemporary PDAs but much smaller than a notebook, such as the original, long-gone and unlamented Windows CE-based computers. What you generally get is something that's too little for touch-typing, but too unwieldy for thumbs, and usually without enough travel to reliably tell you whether your key presses have registered. Yet it doesn't have to be that way: The bygone Psion Series 5 proved that touch-typing in a minuscule space can be downright decent.

I'm not saying that QWERTY is the only usable way to get information into a device. I'm still a great fan of speech recognition, which is showing up on phones. But in noisy venues or those that call for silence, the keyboard wins every time; and even when speech is an option, you still want to have keys for editing the inevitable speech-input errors.

Even on traditional PCs, designers don't pay enough attention to keyboards. Sony's compact notebooks used to have a wonderful extra function key embedded among the arrow keys. It let you use one hand for two-key combinations like <Page Up> and <Page Down>. Alas, that key has vanished--and with it, some ease of use.

But that sacrifice is nothing compared with the usability you lose when you don't have a real keyboard at all. It may be an old-fashioned gadget, but like baseball and hot dogs--two other nineteenth-century innovations--the QWERTY keyboard shows not the slightest sign of age.