Is hardware QWERTY really overrated?

Have you noticed how some new smartphones from Nokia have given up on hardware qwerty on their devices? Was this just a whim that the interaction design team at Nokia wanted to fullfill or could it be that there is realization amongst many that hardware qwerty is not a natural way to interact with a handheld? It is unwieldy for large people and the device form factor is altered for the worse which in turn makes it more ergonomically incorrect as an effective mechanism for user input. The “blackberry thumb” is not a myth - excessively using your thumb for scrolling and/or as a primary pivot on the device creates a host of orthopedic problems.

When I was younger I would have labeled (shunned really) their (Nokia’s) entire design staff as monkeys-with-caps and moved on - but age (humility really) has allowed me to objectively look at some of the experiential elements of the hardware qwerty and it’s alternatives - now, this is not a full fledged user experience/interaction study but an overview of my experiences with some of the other input mechanisms on handheld devices and smartphones.

The Alternatives to hardware QWERTY on mobile devices:

Graffiti - The “real” Graffiti which Palm introduced on its Palm OS platform in the 90’s was an offshoot of the Unistrokes system developed at Xerox. A ton of legal wranglings gave rise to Graffiti 2.0 which still runs on Palm (but is just not the same :)). I was upto about 40+ words per minute on Graffiti when I was involved with the IPUG and I knew people who were uptp 50+ words per minute without breaking a sweat. This was a great alternative but still required 2 hands to work with - one to hold the device and another to work the stylus on the screen, this turned out to be quite ineffective on a mobile phone as I quickly found out when using the Handspring Treo with the Symbian GSM add-on.

Virtual Keyboards - These are available on practically all the mobile OS’s and again require the use of 2 hands and hence are not really user friendly while being used on a smartphone. I have used virtual keyboards on Palm OS, ARM-Linux, Symbian and Windows Mobile and the user experience is atrocious - the keyboard is always miniaturized and it is almost always unusable due to the size of the keys on the keymap.

Tap-a-Tap - The Simputer project which I worked on while in India had a creative and intuitive input mechanism. tapAtap is a character-input application, similar to but distinct from graffitti. Characters are entered using a 3×3 grid by tapping grid interiors. The figure generated by connecting the “tapped” points, roughly resembles the way the character is written. Tapatap starts of in “letter” mode; it can be changed to go into “number” mode by clicking on the button at the top. This brings up the numeric telephone style keypad, for number entry. Clicking again on the button at the top, brings it back to the “letter” mode. This you could use as an input mechanism on any smart device since it required just one hand, but it was slow even for seasoned Simputer users

Handwriting Recognition - This was pioneered by Microsoft (yes, I did say that!). I can almost hear the anti-microsoft camp calling a boycott of my blog but I think the only company that truly built a widely used handwriting recognition system and shipped it with their OS as an in-built application was MS. It required some amount of training but was the defacto mode of input on handhelds for many thousands of users. This ofcourse fails our litmus test for smartphones though - onwards…

Voice Recognition - The holy-grail for input mechanisms on mobile devices. It just does not work (yet!).

The alternatives I listed above are all possible solutions but not practical ones that can directly replace the hardware qwerty’s that we use on our smartphones today. For next generation phone designers (that’s us!) this is an interesting problem to solve…
My thoughts keep oscillating towards accelerometers and widescreen displays as I think of a usable alternative - but more on that someother time… If you have used or know of other interesting mechanisms for user input on handhelds or smartphones (no add-on hardware eg. keyboards etc.) please leave comments.