New Apple Tech

Rumors surrounding the apple tablet have only focused on the looks and not too much of the functionality of the tablet. Text input for the tablet could make or break this device. This has been a problem for apple and other companies for quit a while. CES was filled with tablet devices that couldn’t get it quite right. So the question how do you create text with out a keyboard?

People have been typing without physical keyboards for years now, and this is largely Apple’s doing. One of the major selling points for the iPhone was the onscreen keyboard. Apple was one of the first companies to make onscreen typing bearable.

Now bringing this technology to the Apple tablet, some say could be a big mistake. There were many different tablets at CES nearly all ha d a traditional onscreen keyboards. One tablet stood out however. The android 2.0 keyboard, which is aesthetically different but functionally almost identical to iPhone OSes. The onscreen keyboard as we know it doesn’t scale gracefully, and unless Apple wants their tablet to be completely useless (our sources say they don’t) they’re going to have to figure this out. So what are Apple’s options?

Apple has had its share of mistakes in the past; however putting an onscreen keyboard could be one of those mistakes. Style, thumb-actuated onscreen keyboards work on screens up to about five inches, with the 4.3-inch-screened HTC Touch HD2’s keyboard straining even the most unsettlingly long thumbs. But to assume that this won’t work is to assume that the tablet is to be held a certain way, with hands at four and eight o-clock, more or less like a touchscreen phone in landscape mode.

A single, iPhone-esque keyboard really shouldn’t be the primary input method. It could be a supplementary input method, but to have two separate text input mechanisms seems messy. Messy doesn’t do to well with apple.

Another solution this problem could be voice control. Apple has been working on perfecting this technology since it introduced spoken interface for the OS X. as it stands the iPhone’s voice control speech recognition is much more accurate, and though there are quite a few customization options, it’s really just a command system, not a full text input system. Apple is very proud of the progress they have made on the Voice Control for the iPhone, and they haven’t removed voice commands from OS X in over five years. However using this type of system to control every function of the new tablet is highly unlikely.

The safest bet for Apple, in handling the input text problem is to come up with some sort of new onscreen keyboard. Any onscreen keyboard would have to be different than the iPhone’s somehow, but to say that Apple’s tablet will have a new style of keyboard is to say that it will have pretty much any kind of onscreen keyboard that is unlike the iPhone’s. Having a split onscreen keyboard isn’t new but it also isn’t something we see to often.

The best alternative is an actual, available product called DialKeys. Co-opted by Microsoft a few years ago, this tech, which splits the keyboard into two crescent-shaped virtual keyboards, shipped with a handful of touchscreen UMPCs, a category of devices that died off before it had the time to truly solve the onscreen keyboard problem. It wasn’t very good. But the concept had potential, maybe.

The biggest problem Apple has to face in the text input. There is no clear answer what route Apple will take. Apple has a way of taking existing technology and perfecting it. It seems, for know, the split onscreen keyboard is the best solution.

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