A Future Without Keyboards

My crystal ball isn't any clearer than anyone else's, but I'm beginning to think that I've glimpsed a future without keyboards. Or at least a future where keyboards will be considered niche devices by the vast majority of the population.

I've been using one Palm personal digital assistant or another for years, ever since Mrs. Overclock (a.k.a. Dr. Overclock, Medicine Woman) introduced me to them. My latest, a Palm T|X, incorporates both a BlueTooth and a WiFi radio. Somewhat to my surprise, the included web browser has proven to actually be quite usable. I routinely use the pocket-sized device to check my electronic mail, particularly while travelling without my laptop, and even to do some web cruising. Now I wonder how I ever did without it. I did buy a wireless keyboard for the T|X (it actually connects via the infrared port), but I seldom use it. What little typing I have to do I find that I can make do with the character recognition or the on-screen keyboard.

My experience over a decade ago with the very early Sharp Zaurus PDA, which had a tiny keyboard, has convinced me that such keyboards are just about useless. I want either a more-or-less full size keyboard suitable for touch typing, or no keyboard at all. My experience, mostly bad, trying to text from my Motorola RAZR phone hasn't done anything to change my mind.

Being a developer, I naturally thought about trying to develop for the PalmOS platform. Years ago I poked around a little, even tried the recommended development environment (CodeWarrior). But in the end I decided it wasn't worth my time, deciding instead to concentrate on more mainstream systems like Linux. In hindsight that was the right decision. Even Palm apparently thinks so.

Mrs. Overclock also insisted that we get a TiVo, the Linux-based DVR that so many have described (accurately as it turns out) as a life changing experience. It's easy to love the TiVo on-screen user interface. It's a remarkable UI that can please both a cynical thirty year veteran of the Coding Wars and a simple country doctor. One of the things about the UI that impressed me is how functional it was using just the "peanut", the TiVo remote which has not much more than a numeric keypad, some arrow keys, and a select button. I routinely find myself "typing" in the name of a television program using just a few presses of these simple controls. Keyboard neither required nor necessary.

My friend and embedded wonk Todd Blachowiak put me onto the Nokia N800 internet appliance. This is a pocket-sized device not much bigger than the T|X that also includes BlueTooth and WiFi radios, an FM tuner, a CCD camera, two speakers, a microphone, a microphone and headset jack, and it runs Linux. Digital Aggregates recently purchased one of these gadgets, and I am in the process of setting up a development environment (all open source of course) in the secure underground corporate data center. (Okay, I'm downloading some tar balls onto one of the Linux servers in the basement.) A BlueTooth keyboard is a common accessory for the N800, and in time I'll probably buy one. But so far I've been doing okay without it. I can easily see using this device as an FM and Internet radio, an MP3 player, a VoIP phone, a camera, an RSS reader, a web browser, and an email client. All without a keyboard.


You know how sometimes you hear a new word, then suddenly it's like everyone is using that word in every other sentence and you wonder how you, who considered yourself at least basically functionally literate, are only just now noticing this? This happened to me recently with tablet PCs.

I figured tablet PCs were a real niche until I spend four months working with a developer who used an HP tablet PC on a daily basis. Mike Dierks had a keyboard for his tablet at home, but routinely brought just the tablet to work, and happily used it to take notes in meetings, cruise the web, and review documents, all without benefit of QWERTY. He told me tales of another developer he had worked with that used a Fujitsu tablet as his daily link to the digital domain. Then Mrs. Overclock attended a conference where she talked to another physician who was taking notes on a Toshiba tablet.

It's like y'all decided to throw a tablet PC party, and you didn't invite me.

My experience with the T|X, TiVo, and the N800 were enough to get me thinking about a future without keyboards. Doing without a keyboard suddenly started to seem, well, doable. Oh, sure, I still need a keyboard, and a decent one at that, for a lot of important stuff. Stuff like blogging and coding. But for much of the other stuff for which I use my laptop, I don't need a keyboard at all. In fact, much of the time, the keyboard is just in the way.

So I decided to put my money where my mouth was. Actually, I decided to put my employer's money where my mouth is. When it came time for the company to refresh my ancient but beloved IBM ThinkPad T30 laptop, I chose an Lenovo ThinkPad X61 tablet to replace it.

The X61 tablet is both a laptop and a tablet. It opens like and can be used as a conventional laptop. In this mode it fits in the ultra-portable category, weighting in at about four pounds depending on the battery. But the screen can pivot 180 degrees and fold down flat against the keyboard, forming a tablet. It's screen uses Wacom digitizer tablet technology, and a digitizer pen pops out from its hiding place beneath the keyboard. I love the fact that I can use it conventionally to enter text and code, but then in a few seconds convert it to tablet mode for convenient web cruising.

When using Google Reader to keep up with my RSS feeds, the tablet absolutely rocks. It's as if BoingBoing and Stuff On My Cat were published in a book. A high resolution, high contrast, interactive, multimedia book. I feel like Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Reading Salon is like reading a magazine in meatspace. I'm just glad we have WiFi coverage in the bathrooms.

I won't bore you with an in-depth review of the X61 (I love it; the jury is still out on Windows Vista). Those are available elsewhere. Perusing tablet PC sales figures published on the web, it's hard to draw any conclusions, except maybe sales are "slowly gaining momentum". So this probably falls under the "90% crap" that is the subtitle of this blog. But I think I have seen the future. And tablets (particularly convertible tablets, like the X61) are it.