Let’s paint a picture for you; you whip out your smartphone, fire up the Facebook app, see that your buddy wrote something witty, and you click the comment box, ready respond. Suddenly, your phone’s keyboard overlay pops up, taking up half your screen’s real estate.
Doesn’t that bug you? If not, then move along. If so, then we may just have a solution for you. Via an Indiegogo funding campaign, a new minimalist keyboard solution called Minuum is here to change the way we view touchscreen typing.
The image above says it all; Minuum only takes up one row…that’s it. Gone are the days where a huge virtual keyboard pops up to block half the stuff you want to see. But there’s more to Minuum than just the small layout.
You might be thinking to yourself “Sheesh, I’m never going to be able to type accurately on that thing! All my texts are going to end up on damnyouautocorrect.com!” According to the developers, you could not be more wrong (though I’m sure the odd autocorrect will still slip through the cracks every now and then). Minuum has a “specialized auto-correction algorithm that allows highly imprecise typing” but still will produced the correct words. Only time will tell if this works as well as it sounds, but with the layout of the keyboard being so small, something like this MUST exist otherwise Minuum could potentially end up being a huge headache.
Benefits of using Minuum include:
– Recovering more than half of the usable touchscreen space you lose when you type on traditional virtual keyboards
– Allowing you fast text entry when your typing is sloppy
– Providing you with letter magnification for precise typing—especially useful if you have large fingers
– Giving you the benefit of smart auto-correction
– Respecting your familiarity with the QWERTY keyboard so you don’t have to re-learn the keyboard layout
– Providing convenient access to everything you’d expect in a keyboard (such as, punctuation, space, backspace, and enter) without stealing your screen space
– Letting you type anywhere—with a keyboard you can move around your touchscreen
Swiftkey is currently my keyboard of choice. Let’s see what Minuum can do when it launches.
source | indiegogo
