Pen vs. Keyboard vs. Touch vs. Everything Else 203
benz001 writes "In the run-up to everyone's favourite tablet, Phil Gyford goes back through his gadget collection and compares text entry speeds to see which one comes out on top. It's not what you'd call a rich data set, and of course the Qwerty keyboard comes up trumps, but the iPhone virtual keyboard came in a surprisingly close second, just edging out the Treo — and all the keyboard solutions regardless of how small and fiddly beat real pen and paper. This probably matches most people's experience (when was the last time you had to handwrite more than a bullet point in a meeting?) and gels pretty well with Macworld's predictions but I'm still hoping for sub-vocal voice recognition. (Jump straight to the final results here)."
a true geek ... (Score:5, Interesting)
We just need those little mouth shields... (Score:4, Interesting)
I went to jury duty the other day, and the steno reporter... wasn't really using a steno machine. She was annotating the taping by speaking the non-verbal events into a little mouth-shield thingie.
So verbal dictation is possible- you'll just like more of a geek.
Re:Slow QWERTY typer (Score:4, Interesting)
virtual keyboard (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't meant that I relish the notion of doing much writing on any tablet computer with a virtual keyboard. But, it isn't as bad as, say, a laptop with a touchscreen top and bottom.
Re:Slow QWERTY typer (Score:3, Interesting)
75 or so wpm isn't a world record or anything, but it's probably quite a bit faster than the average person can type, and very respectable.
His iPhone speed of 40 wpm is pretty fantastic, but the minimal finger movement and not needing to hit the keys hard can make up for the extra fingers you get to use on a full size keyboard. I'm even more impressed by his Treo speed.
Treo Keypads Are Fast (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, but what are you writing? (Score:4, Interesting)
The tests were done using a 221 word long paragraph in English. How fast would any of these methods be at entering something like the Schrödinger Equation [wolfram.com]? Sure, you could type "i\hbar\frac{\partial\psi}{\partial t} = \frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\nabla^2\psi + V(\mathbf{r})\psi" on a keyboard just about as easily as "I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in Great Britain", but realizing that you've made a mistake and fixing it would be difficult.
Some things are easier with a keyboard and some things that are just easier to do with a pen and paper, be they real or virtual.
Where's shorthand?! (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I know it's a dying art, but he put speeds up for the Palm Graffiti didn't he?!
I'm currently learning Teeline shorthand which I'm told gets speeds of around 120 words per minutes if you know what you're doing. Pitman on the other hand can reach a paper burning 300 words per minute, although you trade your sanity in for learning that.
Would completely change the results and put pen and paper up top.
Palm Graffiti (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm surprised that Palm Graffiti came in last place, especially by that big of a margin. I used a Palm Pilot extensively for several years, and I could "write" on my Palm Pilot much faster than I could write on pen and paper.
It took a few weeks to get used to it, but after you learned Graffiti well enough, you could actually "write" pretty fast with it. The test behind TFA apparently used a novice to test Palm's Graffiti. A Palm Pilot veteran would have been able to write in Graffiti at speeds nearer to actual writing, and maybe faster.
68 WPM (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"...handwrite more than a bullet point..." ??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting, to me... (Score:2, Interesting)
I really want to know how much this changes on a per person basis...
At work, I use a tablet PC exclusively. Now, I'm able to dock the (once pretty nice, but now piece of shit, thanks to dating hardware and loads of paranoid IT apps monitoring every single thing we do) thing, but the majority of my input on it is handwriting. Now, the fact that I get to use a point and click interface for it does alter it. However, I have to catch a lot of information in one paragraph, and the goal is to complete that and all of the extra pointing and clicking (often including handwriting as the point and click doesn't have everything, and I'm forced to use an "Other" entry box) within a very short time. This can be as long as 5-10 minutes, but is usually under that. This also includes correcting the handwriting recognition's text, which I have to do a hell of a lot, as I'm doing this in a medical setting, using a lot of medical terminology, without a medical dictionary installed to the handwriting recognition (it exists, but getting IT to replace batteries and styli that are long overdue for replacement is a pain in the ass enough money-wise).
What I'm getting at: my handwriting in these circumstances has gotten ridiculously fast--and I don't use any kind of shorthand or even abbreviations. To the point that, if I didn't type over 100 wpm, it would probably be faster for me to handwrite than type in QWERTY. It certainly destroys my typing speed on my Droid, which I've gotten pretty damn good at (specifically the on screen keyboard, because I got well faster at that than I am at the hardware keyboard). So, really, this is interesting, but I really think it's going to vary by just who you test it on. I could see the majority matching these results, but I think it would be stupid to say it's a catch-all...
Re:Virtual keyboard not faster (Score:1, Interesting)
My guess is he's just not that good of a touch-typist. Before I sold my Treo, I did comparisons with it and the iPhone after several months of use, and there was no contest there, either. I was about 80% faster on the treo, and about three times faster than that on a real keyboard. But not everybody types that fast, so if you suck at it, the numbers will change.
This also predates the substantially more usable landscape keyboard on the iphone, which is large enough to allow the same sort of two-thumb typing style I used with the treo. A re-test today might find the treo and the iphone a closer match, but the ability to use touch to align with letters is a large advantage. On the other hand, the iPhone's prediction and error correction get to be pretty reliable once trained, which makes up somewhat for the inability to tell exactly what key you're hitting. All things being equal, i'm sure that the treo keyboard would win. But they're not-- once you learn just how fudgy you can be on the iPhone, and it learns the words you use and stops putting "duck you" in your text messages, the software compensates substantially for the disadvantages the virtual keyboard has.
shorthand is handy! Fast write, slow read, though (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, shorthand is very useful. I can write shorthand about as quickly as I can type. The advantage of shorthand over typing is that you can do it with low-tech implements (pen and paper). The disadvantage is that, for me at least, it's harder to read. Shorthand speeds up the writing (input) speed at the expense of slowing down the reading (output) speed, where input and output are from the point of view of the piece of paper as a storage medium.
So if someone is speaking and I only have my Treo (which has that tiny keyboard for thumbs), I won't be able to keep up on the Treo, so I write shorthand instead. However, afterward I have to spend time transcribing it.
It took me about a week to learn enough to start using. I started replacing some words in my handwritten notes with shorthand notation, and kept adding more shorthand words to my vocabulary. After a month I was at about 50% shorthand mixed with 50% conventional words, and at 2 months I was basically doing all shorthand. I used Gregg shorthand [wikipedia.org] rather than Pitman because you don't need to write on lined paper and you don't need to tell between thicker and thinner pen strokes (which you can easily do with a pen but not with a pencil).