Comparing Touchscreens and Keyboards
Comparing Touchscreens and Keyboards
The home user has only to take a moment to consider whether they like touchscreens or keyboards, but the business owner and industrial provider has to ponder the question more deeply. The question changes when you're ordering for thousands of employees. We'll discuss ramifications for both here.
Keyboards have a lot of loyalty in tech circles. Especially the full-sized keyboards that go with desktop personal computers and workstations. The benefits are that human hands are most comfortable on a large keyboard, which provides the most comfortable typing. For those of us who grew up using computers in the "space cadet" or "bucky-bits" era, when you were expected to play four-and-five-key combos, nothing else feels quite as natural.
But time has marched on. In fact, the single greatest bottleneck to adopting mobile devices is the tiny keyboards we have to adapt to. UMPCs and Blackberrys are fantastic, but those tiny little buttons are suitable for little more than twiddling out one-line messages with the thumbs - and the thumbs get tired fast!
Touchscreens are a much better solution for mobile devices. One big reason is because a keyboard can be replicated in software, and then, unlike a physical keyboard, an onscreen keyboard can be changed to a different layout. It can not only switch between Querty and Dvorak, but to Icelandic or Chinese as well. In addition they can be adapted to using fingers or a stylus.
One red flag for touchscreens, however, is the large touchscreen surface. If you have a flat monitor in front of you, tapping and moving things on the screen can become tiring very fast. The syndrome has the nickname "gorilla arm," because the muscles in your forearm become strained if you're making gestures in front of your face for eight hours a day. Similarly, a large flat table surface looks really impressive in a demo, but again physically making those sweeping arm gestures day in and day out gets old fast.
But some applications are perfect for large touchscreens. One example is media. When CNN or BBC does a newcast about an election or a war and they have data spread out all over a big board, they can control it easily since all they have to do is manipulate it for thirty minutes or less in front of the camera.
Getting back to small devices, touchscreens have a couple of those drawbacks. The glass surface can easily get dirty from greasy fingerprints, and if somebody taps them with an object not suited for the task and damages the screen, there goes your device. You don't think of this until you see an engineer working in the field, who uses a screwdriver to tap his PDAs icons, since one's already in his hand.
One more thing to consider is repetitive motion injury. With large keyboards, the microcomputer revolution discovered a new disease: carpal tunnel syndrome. This is when the nerves in the wrist become pinched as a result of too much typing on those large computer keyboards. Another kind of repetitive stress comes from using a mouse, which is why many mousepads now come with gel pad wrist supports.
At the very least, you should try out a model for yourself. Whatever interface you decide on, try using it for a day or so. Note what works and what fails for your particular case. But also take into account the various needs of your staff, if you have to make such a decision.
P.S. If you're still sold on a keyboard, don't forget there's hybrid touchscreen keyboards coming - just to confuse the issue even further!
Filed Under: Featured • Mobile Computing • PDAs
