HTC says bye bye to QWERTY keypads on phones

I don't know why more consumer products manufacturers haven't dumped the QWERTY keyboard.

QWERTY was developed for typewriters because ABC... caused the hammers to stick together. Abc and so on are the most common keys used.

Jeff

finally moving on

This is not moving on, this is chronological snobbery. The fact that the keyboard predates the touchscreen is not evidence that the keyboard is inferior. There's still no touchscreen that's even close to good enough for typing.

working with computers for my job having to look for an alpha keyboard rather than a qwerty one means i never use an alpha. my fingers know where the keys are. prefer qwerty after 30 years using them

Back in the late '70's and early '80's I was supervisor of Tab products company data entry division. They missed the boat when the IBM i8088 PC was released trying to keep an 80 column 200 pound keypunch and key to disk which sported an 8" floppy disk alive. The 8" floppy was a Seagate which weighed a hefty 20 or so pounds.

Shipped machines thru out the US and EU. QWERTY and EBCDIC keyboards were the norm. However even way back when I questioned the usefulness of such dated keyboard standards.

Jeff

because qwerty is still taught in schools which is why it is still being used.

Qwerty keyboards were developed with letters that commonly go together close to each other. Once you learn where the keys are it is much faster typing than with an abc keyboard.

wrong, qwerty keyboards were designed to slow a a typist down on the old manual typewriters as a person can type faster then the mechanical linkages can & the keys get jammed up. ever hear of a dorvak keyboard as laid out differently from a qwerty keyboard?

I prefer phones with the physical keyboard. Makes it easier to type without looking directly at the phone constantly.

According to Wikipedia "A popular myth is that QWERTY was designed to "slow down" typists though this is incorrect – it was designed to prevent jams while typing at speed, allowing typists to type faster"

I think the idea is that they placed the most used keys away from each other to keep them from jamming together when typing fast.