First, there was the touch
Posted by Anne on May 11, 2010
David Griner with his article on The Social Path and Google with its recently new keyboard toy started some thinking and debates around the office related to the future usage of classical keyboards versus touchscreens. Do you think that the next generation will ever use a keyboard again?
source: Gizmodo
We’re already resignated to the thought that our children and grandchildren will never use the Chinese Fountain Pens we had and will never get stained with blue ink while practicing neat writing. The future sounds like this: you touch the screen with your finger and the word is there.
The present already offers us plenty of this innovative writing: smart phones and smart displays, controllers for video games and all sorts of smart tricks used by platforms like Google, which are able to predict the words you want to type, so that you can quit writing the full sentence and resume to pressing “enter”. There is also Swype, the finger-tracing text programm and the list is open to daily releases.
That should make it easier for us to accept that this is the future; maybe also the present, as 2 year olds are able to use an iPhone before being able to read or to write.
We’ve got our own classical pro&con list, which we leave open for your opinions.
For the pro we can track down the following: touchscreens are smaller and slimmer, so you save up space. They can easily be improved, with a software update. They offer the option to switch the language automatically and they can perform translations on the content. And then there are the smarter touchscreens, like the iPhone, which can predict the letters you want to type and make it easier and faster to select those ones.
For the con we would start with the lack of a touch feedback: when pressing a button, you have the physical evidence of your action and you wait for an answer, whereas when dealing with a touchscreen, you can have a delay in answer and may find yourself in the situation of not knowing what to do – wait or type the same leter 10 times until you get a confusing display? Another con point would be that you cannot use a touchscreen without looking. You may be able to type on a physical keyboard just by feeling the letters and watch the screen or something else at the same time; but touchscreens require your full attention.
Some experts give an insight on the world of touchscreens here.
And while they do this, we can think of what to do with all the free space we save by using touchscreens: maybe store some books and oldfashioned diaries? Nostalgia has to be fed somehow.
