8pen: Reinvented Keyboard for Mobile Devices

8pen Rethinks the Mobile Keyboard

One problem with touchscreen smartphones is that the keyboard is still stuck in the 19th century. Even with those cute little pop-out virtual keys, typing is still a hunt-and-peck affair. Development groups have seen an opportunity here: How do we address the fugliness of mobile typing?

8pen proposes a radical redesign of the keyboard, reducing keystrokes to curved, finger-size-agnostic swipes. 8pen (with which we have no affiliation) is engineered for Android devices. Watching the demonstration video can be a bit perplexing, but the process makes a certain amount of sense. I want to try out to see if it's totally mind-blowing, or eye-gougingly enraging, but so far it isn't working on a Motorola XT720: it installs and presents options in the settings panels, but no actual 8pen keyboard.

Swype is another such text-entry rethink, using the existing QWERTY keypad layout as a word-drawing sandbox for word creation.

If you're interested in how people have attacked the problem of typing throughout the ages, check out my little slideshow of pre-QWERTY typewriters: before we had the Underwood, we had the Blickensderfer.

Videos

The 8pen

see larger video

sourced by Jordan Yerman