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4 Keyboards Innovations
Keyboard seems irreplaceable, still innovations are made to try to disrupt it
QWERTY keyboards have been around for over a century now. Created by the Remington company, the design of the keyboard dates back to the invention of the typewriter. Surprisingly and despite some minor improvements, keyboards have not changed from typewriters to our current smartphones. The layout of the letters has been adapted to other languages to give the French AZERTY for example but this is a rather minor evolution.
Being in the age of disruption of everything and anything, we are entitled to wonder why this invention has evolved little in a century.
The keyboard is an optimized response to a need: to enter information on a medium, the computer. The keyboard is therefore linked to another ancestral technology: writing. Therefore, as long as we have to write using a computer, the keyboard will be the most adequate solution. The shapes and positions of the keys can be improved, but as long as we have to write and as long as we use computers, we will need keys to enter the letters of our words.
However, there are some evolutions around keyboards, some just change the look and others try to reinvent it totally. Here are 4 types of keyboards that I think are interesting in the change of use they bring.
Virtual keyboards
The most used keyboards today are virtual. On all phones and tablets since the iPhone in 2008 a keyboard appears on the touch screen when it is consistent to write something.
Doing without a physical keyboard has been one of the biggest innovations around keyboards. This logic has been declined in various formats:
- Touch keyboards.
These are virtual keyboards projected on a touch screen. This type of keyboard has the advantage of being elegant, as it is often made of glass, and modular, meaning that you can switch from an AZERTY keyboard to a QWERTY or a Japanese keyboard with one click.
The appearance of the keys is also customizable. The disadvantage is that you have to carry a…
