Some Statistics on the First Two Weeks
Here are some statistics on these first two weeks. In the table below, "Alternative" refers to methods that all try to minimize the stylus travel: Atomik, Fitaly and FitalyStamp, MessageEaseST. Qwerty includes various implementations of onscreen Qwerty keyboards. Handwriting includes Graffiti and Transcriber.
Of course this is not yet much data, but one trend already emerges, namely a dominance of thumboard and alternative methods over handwriting and qwerty. I will venture the following explanation: Tapping methods are faster than writing methods because less movement is required for each letter. Yet Qwerty manages to do no better than handwriting because it forces too much travel between keys. In other words, there is more to do to produce a letter with handwriting but Qwerty forces more work between letters, which explains the draw. Thumboards appear to overcome the drawback of Qwerty by using two fingers, with the result that finger travel is cut by two. Another interesting aspect of the first two weeks is that a number of people have submitted entries with more than one method:
It is definitely too early to derive any conclusion on comparing method from these few examples. The only clear conclusion at this stage is that using a PDA for text entry is a very realistic proposal! Jean Ichbiah
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