QWERTY or iPhone?

iPhone is going to hit the market this month. There will be a tsunami of posts and reviews, and I plan to stay out of the crowd. Especially that the first release is going to be US-only (still a very typical approach by many companies...), I will not have much of a chance to play with it. Do I want one? Sure I do. Would it be my primary phone for day use? Probably not. The reason? My current phone has a QWERTY keyboard and every new phone I buy in the future will have one. As long as we will be entering messages other ways than using our brain waves, a QWERTY keyboard is on my list of must - have features of a phone.

Mobile phones are not just phones anymore. People use them to snap photos, listen to music, organize their tasks and calendars and - sometimes - to make phone calls. Apart from making calls, I also listen to music on my phone and use it as a simple photo camera as well. But there are much more important tasks I do on my phone, other than music and photos. Among them are: mobile email, mobile Web browsing and contact management. Email and Web differs fundamentally from music and pictures. So does contact management. These tasks require a lot of data to be entered. Take email - you read what comes in, but very often there is a message that needs immediate attention and a reply. And typing even the simplest sentence is a nightmare without even the tiniest QWERTY keyboard. Same goes with Web browsing. Some of you probably do not agree here. Web browsing is following the links you say. True, but it is not that rare when you have to enter a http:// address or login/password to enter a personalized site. For almost two years I have been using a tablet PC to browse the Web at home. I have given up finally and now I use a laptop. The reason? Entering Web addresses and login credentials on a pen-only tablet was not the most comfortable user experience. With a proper keyboard it is as it should be. The easiest and the fastest and the most accurate. QWERTY is here to stay. Your work computer has it, your home computer has it, your laptop has it, why shouldn't your multi - function phone? I know several people who, once tried a QWERTY phone, never even considered anything else. There are many new ideas of data entry interfaces. Multitap, the old and faithful T9, virtual touch keyboards (iPhone will have this one), but just go and ask a Blackberry user. She will not trade her QWERTY for even the flashiest gadget on the Planet.

Recently I have stopped my gadget hunt for a while and traced the QWERTY back to its origins. It was created in 1860. Unbelievable... Our computers that turn obsolete every two or three years share a piece of hardware that is 150 years old and nobody even dares to think of an alternative... What is more interesting - the QWERTY layout was created to slow down typing on early typewriters by preventing common pairs of typebars from striking the platen at the same time and sticking together. And now it is considered the fastest machine data entry method available to humans. Have we just made a full circle? QWERTY is here to stay. The next machine interaction paradigm will be direct brain coupling. Until then QWERTY rules on every computer, and as phones become portable computers, QWERTY will replace the numeric keypad that used to rule phones when they were just phones.