Is It Time To End Our Love Affair With the QWERTY Keyboard?

Master Moose writes "Brisbane-based entrepreneur John Lambie currently has in beta an alternative to what he calls the 'dysfunctional' QWERTY keyboard. Given the way the world is abandoning their keyboards for smartphones he sees now as the perfect time to introduce a new layout. He calls his new keyboard Dextr and believes it is the natural progression from using a number pad to enter text — This is especially so in developing countries where users have not grown up with QWERTYs on thier phones. While he is not the first to ever propose an alternate or alphabetical keyboard — Are we locked into QWERTY for familiarity's sake, or as we shift to smaller, more mobile and new devices, is Mr. Lambie's project coming at the right time?"

whad"s thi fuss?

[Anonymous Coward]

I, fir one, don"f cee whad thi fuss es apout.

I'n abendonned QWERTY wonks ago amd I'n doung jist fane.

Re:cold dead hands!

[jbeaupre]

You can have my query when you take it from my cold dead hands!

But how do you feel about your keyboard?

Re:No

[eggstasy]

Is it time to stop ending titles with question marks?

The Dexter Keyboard

[SteelKidney]

Small bug in the software. If you mis-key something, you're immediately killed in a plastic-coated room lined with pictures of your misspelled words.

Re:Leave my keyboard alone!

[guttentag]

Saying that QWERTY "optimized" typewriter jamming would be overly generous...

[sarcasm] Apparently it's not just for typewriters. Microsoft said the reason my computer crashed so much was because I was using Dvorak, resulting in crossed bits that would become bound together and were too big to fit through my computer's 16-bit processor. They said this would happen less if I reverted to QWERTY because they keys were optimized to limit crossed bits. I became skeptical of this answer after it continued to happen with 32-bit Windows, given that the processor could now handle more bits than there were letters in the alphabet. [/sarcasm]

Re:No

[todrules]

It's just Shift-3 > #. There ya go.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's called the "hash sign".

This is a pound symbol: £

Fucking yanks.

Re:He will follow in the footsteps of

[Anonymous Coward]

or a small number of dedicated users who cannot understand why everyone else doesn't want to switch to their layout.

You just accidentally described the Linux UI war.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Inertia

[somersault]

Thankyou for your valuable insights.

Re:Inertia

[sentientbeing]

Stupid sexy Flanders

Re:No

[bandy]

Pounds Sterling. Fucking limey.

Re:Inertia

[camperdave]

Maybe the method by which one contracts an STD is the refreshing change, not the disease itself.

Re:Inertia

[phantomfive]

it's an odd feeling actually typing qwerty as a word. Try it and you'll see what I mean

The worst is when you actually type it out as 'querty' :/