ALTERNATIVES…
Graffiti?
Hard to learn. Rigid requirements. Noone ever learns or remembers the nuances. But even after you master Graffiti, what have you accomplished? At best you write slower than you can with a pad and paper.
And think about why typewriters were invented! So… 15-25 words per minute. Try writing
a 3-paragraph e-mail.
“It's taken me 2 years of Graffiti writing to get to my current 30wpm, and here comes Fitaly to blow it all away: 40wpm in less than an hour is just amazing.”
— PDA Geek
“If you write at top speed using Graffiti for a minute or two you will notice that it is absolutely exhausting. It’s much less tiring to use FitalyStamp as your hand barely moves”
— Charles Herold, ON Magazine
Take along Keyboards?
If you set up the keyboard, connect the Palm, and find and sit at a table, they will do some of the job. Of course, if you do that, you could use a much more powerful computer. Try a laptop.
The very things that make the Palm such a great device are: shirt-pocket convenience, always with you, instantly available, impulse available, usable standing up in the hallway, at a meeting, over lunch, in a phone booth… all these situations in which only one hand is available…
The very qualities that make the Palm so useful are almost totally negated by having to set up a keyboard on a desk.
“I bought the Palm… because it looks sexy and small. Now there is no way I’m going to pull out and plug in a keyboard in a public place like a café
‘Hey look everyone, look at me… do ya like my propeller hat?’… Fitaly lets me write without my propeller hat on.”
— Will's Rovings
Onscreen Qwerty keyboard?
Okay using 10 fingers but on the Palm it might be a little cramped. To gain the true benefits, the essence of the Palm, you must use a stylus - the one in the same pocket as the Palm itself. And for speed, you must type - not “write.”
Typing with a stylus on a Qwerty keyboard, however, is not a good idea. A layout designed in 1867 to keep a “type writer” from jamming is not appropriate for stylus tapping; it is using a screwdriver to drive home a nail.
Possible, but too slow, too error-prone, too tiring, too inefficient.
“This style of keyboard was designed for 10 fingers… This makes Qwerty an inefficient method to use when typing with one finger or, on the Palm, one stylus.”
— Ed Curran CNN
Voice? Background noise, privacy, speed, accuracy, cost, vocabulary limitations… and think of four of you paraphrasing the speaker to your pda at a meeting. Other than that…
“… operating my Palm with voice commands won't give the me the privacy I need.”
— Jeff Green, Business Week
What is needed…
A new computer idea needs
a new way to get text into it
specifically designed for it.
It is the only way you will
avail yourself of the Palm's
full benefits: always with you,
always on, always available.
