Speed-up at Texting with KALQ on Your Smartphone

How many words can you type on your smart phone in just a minute or two? Try it and you would probably realize that you already have many thoughts yet you can hardly construct even a fragmented sentence. This is not a symptom of rheumatism on your fingers, but simply a sign that you are not convenient with the touch screen feature of the gadget, or just need to replace the QWERTY with a new pattern that can make texting much easier and faster according to the technology experts and researchers. It is no other than the KALQ that has just been introduced for the benefit of smart phone users.

All About the KALQ

This new keyboard pattern intended for handheld touch screens and is claimed to be 34 percent faster than QWERTY was developed by the researchers at the University of St Andrews. It is primarily designed to speed up thumb typing on tablets and big phones, and the proponents studied the thumb movements that led to the computational techniques to determine the letters that should be on the keyboard. Through the said technique, the researchers assigned the vowels to the right thumb except the letter Y which can be used either as a consonant or a vowel and is assigned to the left thumb. Specifically, the KALQ has a split layout with 12 keys on the right grid and 16 on the left with the commonly used letters classified together. In other words, there is short travel distance and both hands can move alternately and equally. Further, there is also an option for the left-handed users to reverse the keyboard and has altering size to fit to every person’s hands.

Summary of its Notable Features:

• Vowels and consonants are grouped together

• Reverse option for left-handed users

• Has an error correction algorithm that helps users in typing

Benefits for the Users

As noted by the researchers, the users who were trained to use KALQ keyboard have reached 37 words per minute which they also boast to be the highest entry rate on two-thumb typing that was ever reported. It is also above the average 20 words per minute that users can normally reach using Qwerty pattern. And it was also emphasized by the team that if the users are already familiar with the KALQ lay-out, their typing performance would be over thirty percent more efficient than the previous keyboard format. Given that, it is also believed that with only about thirteen to nineteen hours of practice, the users can surpass their typing record in qwerty. But not only in faster typing speed that users are benefited because it is said that the android smart phone and tablet users, excluding iPhone and iPad owners, can download its application next month from Google Play store.

KALQ versus QWERTY

The Qwerty layout has survived throughout centuries after it was first devised by senator and newspaper editor Christopher Sholes and adopted in 1873 by Remington being the largest manufacturer of typewriters, and later became the most popular pattern for English and European languages. And some users are probably asking whether the invention of KALQ signifies its end given that Dr. Per OlaKristensson of the University of St Andrews’ School of Computer Science said that “qwerty has trapped the users with suboptimal text entry interfaces on mobile devices.”

Kristensson also believes that KALQ provides good performance improvement among users to switch and take advantage of the faster and convenient typing. And congruently, project leader Antti Oulasvirta noted that the key for the optimization of keyboard for two thumbs is by minimizing the sequences with one thumb. But significantly, it is recorded that there were already many alternatives such as the Dvorak SImplified Keyboard that failed to beat the qwerty layout despite the advantages they have promised among users.