Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Dvorak Typists Complain About the State of Smartphone Keyboards

by Terrence O'Brien on September 29, 2009 at 07:05 AM

Dvorak Users Complain About the State of Smart Phones
Geeks will endlessly argue about a number of things (e.g., Captain Kirk vs. Captain Picard, 'Lord of the Rings' vs. 'Harry Potter,' 'Star Wars' vs. 'Star Trek,' and QWERTY vs. Dvorak). Dvorak is an alternative keyboard layout (as opposed to QWERTY) that was designed in the '30s by August Dvorak (no relation to Ol' Cranky Pants) in order to allow faster typing.

While Dvorak is not as widely known or used as QWERTY, its passionate devotees fought for decades to get the standard accepted by the American National Standards Institute. It wasn't until the '90s that Windows and Mac PCs supported the format without requiring additional software.

Now, the fight for Dvorak has moved to the world of smartphones. With the appearance of more and more phones featuring full keyboards, users of the Dvorak standard are demanding that manufacturers support their favorite format. None of the major smartphone operating systems support Dvorak out of the box, but there is an application for jailbroken iPhones that adds Dvorak to the onscreen keyboard options.

We may never see a BlackBerry with a physical Dvorak keyboard, but as phones move towards touchscreen-only, it'll become easier for manufacturers to include support for alternatives. Now, it's just a question of who will be first out of the gate with such a feature. [From: Wall Street Journal]

Tags: dvorak, keyboard, qwerty, smart phone, SmartPhone, top

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular