Tablets: How Would You Solve the Input Problem?

247 Comments

View All Comments

• Rictorhell - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link

  First of all, I think tablets are very cool and very interesting, but still, very limited. Until they can get storage up to what I consider a reasonable amount, which is, for me, AT LEAST enough storage for all of my mp3s, with room to spare, then I probably will not be getting one.
  
  What will probably end up happening is that if people do decide to use tablets full-time as an alternative to other devices, tablet makers will start developing all-purpose docking stations with dedicated keyboards, ports, and all that stuff.
  
  The way things are going, very soon you'll be able to pick up a super thin tablet/notebook convertible device anyway that's super thin and extremely lightweight, so this will all be irrelevant. All notebooks will have optional touch-screen interfaces, or, if you choose to just use the keyboard for input you will have that option as well.

• rudy - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link

  Seriously its like no one has been listening I have been saying this forever the current slate form factor is stupid. It is as big as a laptop or netbook so it will not fit in your pocket as stated you are never going to want to carry this every where. Yet it can do nothing more than your phone can do. And somehow it took people over a year to start talking about this instead of just praising the iPad for everything.
  
  The solution is simple just buy the good old tablet if you care otherwise use a full powered computer which can do everything while having a real keyboard. These things really do not fit any sort of useful point in the market they should be pushed off to niche use such as input methods for taking orders at resturants where the choices are limited, and they should be alot cheaper to do that. All the people i know who have tablets fall into 2 catagories they are either mac heads and have no access to a real tablet, or they were given them for free.
  
  If you want to be productive you need power, speed and size, so do it right and buy a desktop, convertible tablet, or laptop depending on your needs. If you want portability by a phone. With the prices of most of the tablets you can hardly justify buying them as well as having a phone which you need and a full powered device.

• justaviking - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link

  As long as we're dreaming and inventing...
  
  FOREARM KEYBOARD:
  
  How about a flexible membrane that wraps around your forearm and serves as an input device? Much like a touch screen, this too would have a software configurable display and layout, changing depending on what your current task is.
  
  Imagine holding your tablet in your left hand and wearing the cuff on your left forearm. Your right hand can "type" on your left forearm without blocking your view of the tablet. (Reverse if you are left-handed.)
  
  At first it might feel unnatural to have your hand in a different place from where your input actually appears, but that is what happens with a mouse, and we got used to that, right? Your hand is on a horizontal table, and moving it back and forth causes a cursor to move vertically on your monitor. After a while they no longer feel disjointed. It's amazing how the human brain adapts to that sort of situation.
  
  People in SciFi movies often have controls on their forearms.
  
  NON-QWERTY KEYBOARD:
  
  Others mentioned keypads on the back of the tablet. Or buttons on the side. Suppose you learned a new "typing language" that was geared toward single-handed entry. Pressing one, two, or three keys in combination would allow for a lot of "keys" even with a single hand. One hand holds, one hand types, or if you hold it with two hands, maybe only three fingers on each hand do the typing.
  
  I once read an article about a man bicycling across the country, and he blogged the entire time. He was on a recombinant (? - reclined) bicycle and had buttons on his handle bar grips. He used them to type on his laptop while biking.
  
  But there would be a real learning curve, and I know my wife detested the "character recognition" on my Palm many years ago. So there might be a lot of resistance to it.
  
  BRAINWAVES:
  
  Another poster mentioned "direct neural input." I was thinking that too. It is really making progress. We're still a long way from it, but quadriplegics are starting to use this. Some use implanted sensors for greater sensitivity, but not all. Who knows what might be possible in 15 or 20 years? By then, we might skip the tablet because the display will be embedded into contact lenses (currently in the lab today).
  
  Really, is the Borg that farfetched when we look out into the future?

• quillaja - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Key...

• Xichekolas - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link

  I think the solution is the Thinkpad Swivel Hinge.
  
  The reason the current Thinkpad Swivel Hinge notebooks suck is because they are too thick/heavy to be held like a tablet and they have an OS (ahem Windows) that has a crappy touch UI.
  
  So, you make something with the weight/thickness of a Macbook Air, put a swivel hinge and a touchscreen on it, then use something like Honeycomb or iOS.
  
  You could be surfing along in tablet mode, need to write a comment, swivel out the keyboard, write your comment, then swivel back when you want.

• rudy - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link

  Ask yourself this why do these slates even exist, it is not because they are great it is because apple figured it was the only way to sell people more devices and they used a massive advertising campaign to drill that into peoples heads and this was only because apple did not have a true tablet in their lineup. No one else saw the value because they all knew just as this article points out the device didnt make much sense practically. Certainly not at the $500 price point.
  
  Think about it realistically apple laptop 1000 - 2000, iphone $200 on a contract and ipad $500+ if apple had a real tablet no one would have ever even considered the iPad because you can buy a really nice tablet for $500 over the price you spent on a laptop.
  
  So basically yes apple created a new market trend because they refused to deliver a better product.
  
  I am not saying slates have no place but 100% of everyone I know who has one is not using it where it should be used. A slate would be good if you were were trying really hard to save money on a data plan and only used a dumb phone and you did not happen to have any other device like a mp3 player that was wifi capable, and you did not have a laptop or convertible tablet. Then a slate makes sense but how many people who have one actually fall into that catagory of having not one single mobile device that is not smart?

• lihtness - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link

  I would love to use the ipad all out, only when there is real productivity apps like word, xl and pp. and when i am able to save the documents locally.
  
  keyboard would be the next.. i wish the smart cover also had a keypad in it.

• cotak - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link

  I see Anand is still trying to find out how this tablet can be justified even though the first round the entire staff admits they found little use for a tablet.
  
  Why can't people just face fact that for real world use the tablet is pretty niche? Sure, there are some situation like air travel where he long battery life can come in handy but from the looks of various review you only get the advertised 10 hours if you avoid certain activity like gaming. It's still good for a decent part of a long haul or an entire mid distance flight. However, given that you are provided with movie choices on longer flights it's utility is a question mark.

• quillaja - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link

  I tried a Xoom the other day for 15 minutes or so, and I found typing on the keyboard wasn't as bad as I expected. In landscape mode I could go at it almost like a normal keyboard, and in portrait mode, it was fairly comfortable to use with just my thumbs (I think the iPad is wider, so it might not be as good for that). The worst thing is the odd keyboard layout, but I suppose you'd get use to that if you used it frequently.
  
  That said, I think speech recognition and text-to-speech is the real way to go. The only problem is that it currently sucks for taking long rambling monologues and turning them into sentences and paragraphs. Windows's built-in speech recognition isn't too bad, and I've heard Dragon is good though I've never used it. Android's voice search is surprisingly good at short little clips.
  
  But they all currently fall short of my vision: A tiny (think something like a wrist watch), or at least the size of current smart phones, computer with a smart AI which you can simply talk to as if you had a personal assistant following you around. eh, maybe someday.
  
  The other option is going "back" to handwriting. The thing is, it seems like the world simply hates handwriting now, so I dont expect it to get any traction. The vision for digital inking is not to have the computer convert your handwriting into standard text (at least not ostensibly), but for it to stay as handwriting when viewed by others. An email, blog comment, etc, would simply be a reflowable representation of my actual handwriting. The text conversion would happen in the background so that machines can read it (like metadata or something). This is way past what we've seen so far with MS's attempts at making Tablet PCs happen. But this'll never happen, I know.

• geekforhire - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link

  I saw this case in a Boulder restaurant a couple weeks ago, and the person appeared to be effectivly typing into their iPad using the keyboard built in to the case. Hope you find it interesting too.
  
  http://www.zagg.com/accessories/zaggmate-ipad-case