Will the Kalq keyboard finally spell the end for qwerty

Reasearchers at the Unversity of St. Andrews have developed a split-screen keyboard that they claim can increase typing speeds for touch screen users.Since the arrival of touchscreen tablets, our opposable thumbs have evolved to a whole new level of refinement. It has become second nature to pinch and swipe, slide and scroll: without knowing it, we have developed an intricate vocabulary of manual flourishes, a delicate finger ballet to conjure images and text across our screens.And yet the process of typing words on a touchscreen still remains unbearably clumsy. Whether you put the thing down and pretend it's a normal keyboard, or go for the handheld thumbs-only option, it is never a particularly elegant or satisfactory pursuit, like having a game of thumb war with your imaginary digital friend.They call their new keyboard Kalq (those are the letters at the bottom right of the keyboard), and its layout is a radical departure from the qwerty system, which has been with us unchanged for 140 years. Designed to save your thumbs stretching across the screen and making repeated taps, Kalq splits the keys into two blocks, 16 to the left, 12 to the right. Commonly used letters are clustered together and frequent pairs of letters placed on alternate sides, so each hand does the same amount of work."The key to optimising a keyboard for two thumbs is to minimize long typing sequences that only involve a single thumb," said Dr. Antti Oulasvirta  of the Max Planck Institute for intormatics in Germany, who collaborated on the research. "Experienced typists move their thumbs simultaneously: while one is typing, the other is approaching its next target. We derived a predictive model of this behavior for the optimization method."So what difference does it actually make? Their tests show that after only 10 hours of training, users were able to reach 37 words a minute, compared with the average of 20 words a minute on a qwerty device.