I am an armchairperson (get it?)...so I have an interest in this. Well, my brother-in-law is so interested in this kind of technology, he has become a low-level evangelist for it, showing captive audiences the Jeff Han video and the like. But what stake does someone like him really have in this kind of interface? He's not a graphic designer or someone who works in the visual arts. Why are we (generally) and guys like him (in particular) suddenly so anxious to get away from our keyboards? Yes, I understand Steve Jobs' point of view that the keyboard we have hooked up to our devices is a one-size-fits-all peripheral. As a result, the keyboard does have a number of limitations. It can't highlight and/or enlarge the important keys used by particular applications and it can't disappear when you don't need your keyboard but do need extra space. But it seems like I would really miss what we would lose if we were to ditch our keyboards, what with their whole location in space and time "feature." For one, there's a continuity to using a single keyboard to do all the work a computer or a device does. But even more than that, I feel like we would become just slightly more passive if robbed of our QWERTYs: we would be selecting icons, pointing to items in pull-down menus, etc., instead of typing what we want into the system. With my keyboard I can be creative. With my mouse, I can only grab the cheese they place in front of me. http://www.armchairperson.com

This is where...

PDAs today have touch screens and virtual keyboards. This device WILL probably have the first full sized virtual keyboards. How's that for fun in virtual typing!

Yes, there's the keyboard...but it's the VIRTUAL keyboard. Ah, there's the rub. I've been using a PDA for years that traded a stylus for a keyboard, but even the stylus system offers you something to grab hold of. That was my main point: trading actual, physical objects for virtual ones. Though I'm worried about how a less tactile system would affect our perceptions, connection to technology and an increasing sense of alienation fostered by the role of technology in our lives, I also have a practical concern: if my actual, physical keyboard were to break right now (or if my lette " " we e to stop wo king), I could either fix or replace the keyboard. If my virtual keyboard encountered a problem, I couldn't very well replace it if it were integrated into the entire system. I couldn't even e-mail tech support (without deploying my virtual phone, that is).

I am constantly surprised by all those text-bound computer users (often tech reviewers) who look on their devices as little more than souped-up typewriters, and makes me query their suitability for writing on technology.

A great deal of my (Tablet PC) computer's energy is spent with correcting photos, manipulating maps, editing and marking up documents, creating diagrams and flow-charts, sorting recorded music files, working with MIDI output of music. None of these are job-related activities, nor would I categorise them as "passive" activities. I just get much more bang for buck out of my computing dollar than the qwerty-crowd.