So – this all begs the question – why are we still using the legacy QWERTY keyboard layout on our smartphone keyboards? All the incumbent smartphone keyboard apps: Gboard, SwiftKey and Apple Keyboard, utilise a design that was meant for a completely different product – the mechanical typewriter. The slightly larger surface of smartphones and the emergence of predictive text and autocorrect provided a slightly improved typing experience, but again for some reason most of the world stuck with the legacy QWERTY – even though there were clearly better layouts possible especially considering that most people were now typing with just one or two fingers or thumbs rather than using the full 10 digits. Few would deny that trying to type long messages on a miniscule ‘feature phone’ back in the late ‘90s and early '00s was fun – hence the era of TXTSPEEK was born as a way to shorten the characters needed, and many of those abbreviations (C U l8r m8!) live on in today’s digital comms lexicon. When SMS functionality appeared on early mobile phones, typing got annoying. The Maltron Single-Handed keyboard Why are we still using QWERTY keyboards on smartphones? (good question, we don’t know either…) (Indeed – the Abkey keyboard mentioned in PC World's Weirdest Keyboards article no longer seems to be in business at all). However, such keyboard alternatives tend to remain the domain of hardcore programmers, or niche users, and have not come anywhere close to mainstream adoption. Check out the Maltron Single-Handed Keyboard, or the rather bizarre Safetype keyboard (which looks like you could fly a spaceship with it). There were – and still are – several quirky alternative keyboards for computers. ![]() People were so used to it, that a kind of muscle memory inherent in our hands meant we were loathe to switch to any alternative arrangement – even though such alternatives could actually be better for faster and more accurate typing - once you adapted to them. The QWERTY layout has pervaded for little reason other than habit. Since the world went digital, this once sound reasoning for the QWERTY arrangement no longer had any practical basis. (Photo by Laura Rivera on Unsplash) So why are we still using QWERTY for computers? What QWERTY was invented for 150 years ago.
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