London - If you find you are all fingers and thumbs when it comes to typing on a touch-screen device, help may be at hand.
A team of researchers has reimagined the old QWERTY layout for the digital era. Their new KALQ keyboard can speed up the number of words typed per minute by up to 34 percent.
Typing with QWERTY is notoriously inefficient on touchscreen phones and tablets. The vowels and the most-used letters are spaced out, so thumbs have to work harder and cross over to type even basic words. But KALQ has a spilt layout, with the most commonly used letters clustered together.
This reduces the distance the thumbs travel and evens up the workload between the hands.
The original QWERTY keyboard was devised by Christopher Sholes, an American newspaper editor, in 1875. He rearranged the most-used letters to prevent key clashes, which jammed up the keyboard mechanism. QWERTY survived the move from typewriters to computer keyboards, but the KALQ team believe their option could be the future for hand-held tablets.
Researcher Per Ola Kristensson, from St Andrews University, said: “Before abandoning QWERTY, users demand a compelling alternative.
“We believe KALQ provides a large enough improvement to give an incentive to switch and benefit from faster typing.” - Daily Mail