Dvorak vs. qwerty for smart phones

The Wall Street Journal takes up the qwerty vs. Dvorak keyboard controversy this morning. The latest wrinkle: Dvorak fans want the configuration to be available on smart phones. Writes the Journal, “When the iPhone first came out, Richard Kasperowski wanted one. But there was a problem. The keypad on the phone’s touch screen uses the traditional keyboard configuration, called ‘qwerty.’

“‘I thought it would hurt my brain using a qwerty,’ says the 39-year-old technology director in Cambridge, Mass. He wanted something different. He wanted a Dvorak.”

The Journal elaborates: “The Dvorak keyboard layout, though around for decades, is as little-known among the general typing population as it is passionately embraced by its devotees. It is to the keyboard what Esperanto is to language and Betamax to videotape. Fans say it lets them type at blazing fast speeds, with less strain on their hands and wrists than typing on a conventional keyboard.”

I do find it surprising that it’s not available on smart phones-except, apparently, jail-broken iPhones. It would seem trivial to add the feature to touch-screen phones. The Journal says Apple and Palm declined to comment, while RIM didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Journal article doesn’t contest the alleged superiority of the Dvorak layout. That’s left to commenter Sam Homan, who links to the June 1996 article “Typing Errors” in Reason. According to that article, evidence for Dvorak’s superiority is tainted. It states, “The belief that the Dvorak keyboard is superior to QWERTY can be traced to a few key sources. A book published by [August] Dvorak and several co-authors in 1936 presented Dvorak’s own investigations, which might charitably be called less than objective. Their book has the feel of a late-night television infomercial rather than scientific work.” Initial experiments conducted by the US Navy were not carefully controlled. And in fact, the experiments may have been conducted by Lieut. Com. August Dvorak himself.

The Reason article adds that a subsequent study conducted for the General Services Administration “…provides the most compelling evidence against the Dvorak keyboard. It was a carefully controlled experiment designed to examine the costs and benefits of switching to Dvorak. It unreservedly concluded that retraining typists on Dvorak was inferior to retraining on QWERTY.”

Of course, Reason has its own biases: markets always choose the right outcome, Betamax deserved to die, and Dvorak deserves to be marginalized.

What do you think? Are you a Dvorak fan? And when it comes to typing with your thumbs, does the keyboard layout matter all that much?