7.8. Conclusion

Although the mouse has evolved to touch technology, the keyboard has hardly changed since the creation of the typewriter. Many small devices and tablets offer digital keyboards, but none of them are an ideal solution on their own. They rely on spellchecking and a customized dictionary to compensate for fingers that type the wrong key and ease the cumbersome user experience.

Perhaps a better approach is to move away from the traditional keyboard and to think of using gestures. Palm OS proposed Graffiti in 1996 as a shorthand handwriting recognition system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)). Samsung offers the Swype key that allows you to enter a word in a continuous gesture by tracing a path between letters (http://www.swypeinc.com/product.html). 8pen proposes a hierarchical keyboard (http://www.the8pen.com/index.html).