The keyboard calls me. Type it says. Speak from within. Or perhaps it's the device it's attached to, or perhaps it's me. Regardless my preference for physical keyboards is growing stronger. So strong in fact I am seriously considering the Blackberry Passport, its sexy dark and curvy keys giving me the look. But before we get to my impending descent down the worm hole of elderly technology let's peer into it first and try to make some sense of it.
Let's go back say 30... 35 years even. The flat keyboards attacked. They we horrible. Screen based keyboards are flat and just ok, for me. Physical flat keyboards of the 80's were horrible, for everyone. Of course at the time there wasn't any practical capacitive option, so the flat keyboards I remember required a lot of pressure to strike a key. They looked neat though. They looked like the future and in an odd way they were. Those early flat keyboards were of course attached to early PC's and those PC's, in nearly every way, aided programmers, and not so much everyone else.
Steve Jobs to the rescue(?)
So keyboards were doomed the moment Steve Jobs had his moment in the sun, the moment he saw the future of computing. And he did see it people, no doubt about it. He saw normal people using PC's not just programmers.
In Steve's heyday most PC's were driven by a mixed bag of a few on-screen controls and an abundance of cryptic 2-3 combination keyboard controls. The ability to master these combinations defined your productivity. Not good. Jobs certainly saw users moving away form the keyboard and towards the mouse and the screen. Years later he would essentially ditch everything but the screen and his vision was realized.
For me though the keyboard is a constant, and that's where the power lies. It can't change and adapt the way software keyboards can. A bonus! The benefit for me is that my hands can stay put. Not having to switch back and forth between the keyboard and the screen / mouse is a huge win. It puts me in that Zen like space, where I can attach myself to it and not have the experience constantly pushing me away. There have been attempts to alter physical keyboard functionality based on the context of what we are doing on the screen, but they never succeed. So much of user experience lies in the sense of control. When we lose that sense, frustration sinks in fast.
So call me old fashioned but the screen is for looking, the hands are for doing. Cramping it all into one space is not ideal when my work requires me to create words. When the work is abstracted to that degree, the real screen is in my head. Unless I'm finger painting, I'll take a physical keyboard any day.
I understand that in my longing for physical keyboards I am in the minority and always will be. It certainly is a function of my age. I do not mind programming a keyboard to respond to key sequences to get things done. Again I don't have to move my hands off the keyboard. I can type ctrl-B and a browser pops up. Luckily technology continues to improve upon the analog typing experience, for instance the Passport ingeniously combines a physical keyboard with a capacitive one. The Passport's keyboard itself can accept gestures: a swipe from right to left directly on the keyboard erases the last typed word. Again I don't have to relocate my hands too much, they can stay in tune with the keyboard, and thus stay connected to my thoughts.
Clickety clack.
So I love the physical keyboard. Clickety clack. Like most of the technology of my youth it is becoming a niche player. Clickety clack. But it will never go away completely. Clickety clack. Our world today is a digital world, but the world and the body we are born into is forever an analog one. Clickety clack. Let's fight back for the analogs, let's fight back, for us.