Why Mobile Keyboard Substitutes Annoy Me

This is mostly a rant/explanation/justification and shouldn't be construed as a criticism of any of the products named.

I type around seventy words per minute on a real keyboard. This is a great asset built up over many years with practice and hard work. It's also a bit of a handicap when it comes to dealing with mobile devices as I quickly get frustrated with the drop off in my ability to express myself textually. Apple's soft keyboard is particularly frustrating since it often/always refuses to go into landscape mode on iPhone's and iPod touches. My hands aren't all that large but the extra space that landscape mode provides is a big win for me.

My Nexus 4 is large enough that I can thumb type fairly effectively in the landscape orientation   Adding Swiftkey makes the experience marginally better but even with a bit of practice I don't gain a lot of speed.

Swype on the other hand is a complete disaster for me. It's a totally different (thought related) paradigm to the keyboard entry I'm used to and it makes my head hurt very badly. It feels like I'm being asked to speak a foreign language while juggling.

I've always been the kind of person who embraces change. It  worries me a bit that I can't get my head around a new fangled data entry paradigm like Swype.

I've gone through all sorts of rationales in my head to justify my failure and even now I'm not sure if I'm coming up with good rationales or just making excuses.

With a bit of luck another method of entering text will come along soon that I'll be able to wrap my head around better. That's the great thing about technology right now. If you don't like a particular approach chances are something new will come along in a year or two.

Mobile Device Sensors (Photo credit: IntelFreePress)

Samsung Exynos 5

Samsung just announced the Exynos 5, a mobile ARM processor with eight cores...

http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-goes-big-with-8-core-exynos-5-octa-chip-reveal-09264624/

One potential use for this processor not mentioned in the above article would be in a Chromebook device. The eight processor cores are made up of two groups of four with one set the A7 based cores having power efficiency as their best attribute and the A15 based cores being much better performers at the cost of higher power consumption.

Imagine a Chromebook that used the A15 cores when plugged in and the A7 cores when running off of battery. You'd get the best of both worlds. Performance with the A7 based cores would still be good so there wouldn't be too much of a sacrifice when running off of battery and it would likely be possible to give people the ability to switch to the A15 cores if they didn't mind losing some longevity on their plug free time.

Related Articles:

• Samsung 8-core Exynos 5 Octa chip announced
• Samsung goes big with 8-core Exynos 5 Octa chip reveal

The Concept Explained

I've been writing a business and technology focused BLOG for a few years now. From a marketing perspective this works up to a point. If I get too technical though I'm in danger of completely losing my modest sized audience. Which is why I've created this BLOG. Topics will be short and technically focused. For example, my experience installing DDR 3 DRAM in computers that shouldn't support memory of that size.

Posting will be infrequent but the length will generally be five hundred words or less.

I'll be tweaking the template for a bit so apologies if things don't look right.