The 8pen

The 8pen is an attempt to re-define how people type on touchscreen phones.

They argue that the qwerty keyboard is unsuited to touchscreen, and they're right.  The qwerty keyboard was designed to be quite slow to use, so letters were deliberately put in places that would make it harder to type common words.  For example, it would be useful to have the letters T, H and E next to each other (the most common word in the English language), but in the days of old typewriters this would have meant that people would have been hitting the keys too fast and tangling up the mechanism.  (Although you can argue that because it's relatively random, the qwerty keyboard is similar in all countries using standard type sets).

Watch the 8pen video:  Their idea is good, and definitely worth trying.



This might not be the solution to the qwerty problem, but well done to them for proposing it.

So far The 8pen is only available for Android - you can read more about how to get it here.