Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com what would have happened if we would have skipped from desktop computers or laptop computers straight to smartphones so we didn't even have the bigger versions of these computers because really that's what a modern smartphone is what kind of keyboard would we have put on a smartphone well the guys at 8-pin said it would look something like this let's go take a look okay so what we're looking at here is a soft keyboard a sip or in Android terms an IME called eight pen now eight pen goes back and says what would have happened if we were designing a keyboard for a mobile device and we weren't biased by keyboards that were on well originally typewriters and then have been moved over to desktop computers laptops and then well even eventually on to mobile devices themselves via a slide-out keyboard and then by extension a little soft input panel or that IME well what would that have looked like this is what they came up with what it is is it's four quadrants with a dot and I mean that's as basic as it gets what they've done is they've aligned all the letters on the keyboard around these rays and they've arranged them such that the more frequently used ones are closer to the center and the last frequently we use ones are closer to the outside and the way that you input text is you start in the middle and if you move your finger into whatever quadrant your letters in so if I wanted an H that's down there I'd move my finger down into that quadrant but then I have to tell it you know what is it is it one of those guys or one of those guys well to do that if I want one of these letters I move my finger out in a clockwise direction and if I want one of those guys I move my finger out in a counterclockwise or in their videos they call it an anti-clockwise direction and I still have four letters to choose from so how do I choose one of those well I move my finger down in there and I go counterclockwise and I move it around the quadrants until I get the letter that I want so because H is the second one out I have to move down in here and move counterclockwise to quadrants and then back to the dot to register that so let's go ahead and do that with the word hello let's just do hello you know because you know it really likes hello world so we'll go ahead and do that so I'm going to come over here so there's t there's H and we're going to do an e now we're gonna do an L now we're gonna do another L and we're lastly going to do an O and there you go you've got hello now I can do that a lot faster when I'm not encumbered by doing it on camera here and over time you're going to pick up speed as well the problem with this entire methodology comes into play when you're trying to type something that you haven't used frequently so let's say I'm trying typing an email here to Brandon so let's do hello Brandon so I'm gonna come down here and there's my B so I'm gonna go around that way there's a B and then oh I don't know where R is okay there it is R a but where's n now I have to look all over underneath my finger without lifting my finger to find an N and if I tip my device up just oh it rotated into landscape mode and I have now lost not only my keyboard but where I was in typing that which is really really a pain so that's one thing that they need to work on in this ayah me and I don't know if an IME can tell the device not to rotate into landscape mode or not but that you may think that's really a big stumbling block and you're never going to use it but remember with a qwerty keyboard or Dvorak you didn't know where the keys were to begin with and you had to really practice and you had to look then your fingers were over those keys as well on you know a really physical keyboard so this is kind of the same thing it's going to take you a while to get used to the layout of where all of the letters are but once you do that your text input should really pick up and should be really fast now you'll notice this isn't all of the letters first of all we've got a backspace up here we've got a capitalized button right there we have returned and we have numbers and symbols so it's got kind of all the things that you need in a keyboard really and they're all right they're easy for you to get now if you want to try this on your Android it should work on everything from 2.1 up and it is available for you to purchase and download in the market now notice I did say purchase this is not a free keyboard you do have to buy it and ended up running me right around a buck 70 or so when I downloaded it you can go ahead and download it install it try it out see if you like it and it's got a really good tutorial to begin with if you don't like it remember you've got 24 hours from the time that you downloaded it for you to uninstall it which will automatically give you a refund but it's something neat and it's really showing you what you can do to push the envelope and say what would happen if this is what was the form factor that we started with kind of a neat idea I really have to give the developers credit for coming up with such a radical concept that really is relatively fluid but a little bit frustrating at time is simply because I haven't used it all that much and when I say haven't used it that much this has been my keyboard for the last two days and I have been forcing myself to use it for two days solid so it's not for lack of actually using it it's just I've been using a keyboard now for well longer than I want to admit so if you would like to see similar keyboards such as this in the future go ahead and give this video a thumbs up subscribe to our video channel then leave us comments down below so showing off what you can do with alternate keyboard entries in this case the eight pen keyboard for pocket now I'm Joe Levite