QuoteOriginally Posted by Hands0n View Post
The ergonomics of a keyboard are far from trivial. As a trained touch typist I, and my peers, expect the keys to be in reasonably the same place, regardless of the size of the keyboard. So to take the spacebar and shift it to the near-extreme right hand side of the keyboard is a major issue indeed.

As regards the touchscreen keyboards on the Apple iPhone and several of the Android devices I seem to have accumulated (G1, Magic, Nexus One) these have all been very easy to get to grips with for some reason I cannot fully explain. Using both thumbs I seem to have developed quite a speed at touch typing. Coupled with the handset's "smart" keyboard, where it makes decent guesses of what you've typed, the experience is good. I use both for texting, email and notes making without any bother - but then like I said in another post, I have made a good adjustment to the touchscreen keyboards such that I rarely, if ever, fold out the G1's when I use it.
I'm trained in lots of different things, it doesn't mean that I can't adapt if things change though. I realise that at first it will be a little annoying, but surely your training doesn't make you so rigid that you aren't able to adapt? Its not like the whole keyboard is different, its just one key.

I don't think the onscreen keyboard on my ipod touch is very smart at all, how often is there a capital letter in the middle of a word? Surely even a pretty dumb keyboard would be able to realise that. Don't get me wrong, besides the stupidly placed shift key the onscreen keyboard is pretty easy to use, but the rage caused by that shift key ruins all of the good things it does do, not to mention when you delete the erroneous capital you also have to press the shift key again or your get another unwanted capital letter.

I also don't think the position of the spacebar was the reason for this thread, I think it was as I previously said needless nitpicking for the sake of it.