Is this the world's worst keyboard?

Posted on 27 Sep 2007 at 16:06

New Standards Keyboard (NSK) is the latest company to try and dethrone the QWERTY layout with its new alphabetical order keyboard - with disastrous results in PC Pro's first impression tests.

The rainbow-coloured keyboard features only 53 keys, which are laid out in A-Z order, causing immense confusion with testers in the PC Pro office.

In a far from scientific test, we timed 10 members of our staff typing "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" on both a QWERTY keyboard and on NSK's "typing made easy" competitor.

On average it took our subjects 8.6 seconds to type the sentence on the QWERTY keyboard, and a slothful 37.3 seconds to hunt down the letters, bellow at the screen and then type the same sentence on NSK's model.

While the results are unsurprising given our long experience with the QWERTY layout, replacing the space bar with two tiny buttons, slapping the cursor keys bang in the middle, and only giving access to numbers on a function modifier suggests NSK is taking its revolution a little further than is practical.

As well as question marks over build quality and style, it must also compete with the DVORAK layout which has recently been gaining ground as the alternative layout of choice.

The company says the keyboard is intended for use by "non-typists who never solved the mystery of QWERTY", which is a laudable goal, but whether it actually "sets new standards for user-friendliness and efficiency" is debatable.

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Author: Stuart Turton