"Our brains were structured for 5 digits." I would think, if that was the case, we would first optimize our alphabet for 25/20/15/10/5 characters. Then this would be ideal.
I learned in an intro to cognitive psychology class that it seems that our brain is wired to recognize sets of 1, 2, and 3 things directly, but that after that we construct the numbers. For instance when we see 5 things it is actually 3+2 that we see. The experiment was based on response time + accurateness when showing people sets of geometrical shapes for very short periods of time, sometimes using the same shape for all elements, sometimes random shapes, and sometimes groups of similar shapes. I don't recall the precise reference though, maybe someone else knows it?
To get back to the keyboard, I would like to see a demo video of someone actually typing something with it. The current video doesn't give any sense of what it is like to use this keyboard, and doesn't make me want to try it at all.
And regarding the 3+2 thing that seems true, I always count to 5 in couples of 3s and 2s.
Also Swiftkey is pretty forgiving once you use it more and the predictions become a real time saver.
Why every time the finger starts to slides the only letters left on the keyboard are "EABCD"? How do I type an 'n' for instance? I see that they do a round-trip to enter numbers, but how am I supposed to enter '6'?
These may be the worst demo videos I've ever seen.
I remember another alternative-paradigm keyboard, 8pen, which had pretty good and instructive videos. They should learn from that.
The numbers I'm not sure. I think it is the same concept with 1-4 on the first tile (blue) and other numbers on other tiles.
Still doesn't seem like it would be faster for typing.
Blue (1st) tile is EABCD, Green (2nd) is FIGHJ, Yellow (3rd) is KLONM, Orange (4th) is PQRTS, and Red (5th) is VWXY.
That's what I assumed too, but I didn't want to be sure of it because one have to be too stupid to do a demo of a product using always the same part. "Look I designed a keyboard and I can type with it: 'aaaaaaaaaaa'".
Okay, so it means that if I want to type 'n' I hit the 3rd tile and then I have to move four tiles away. Except I can't. So I guess I'll have to go backward when I reach the last tile in the direction I chose. But that seem to conflict with what I inferred for numbers…