8pen
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2025
4:11 · 1.1M views · Oct 30, 2010
A demo of the 8pen, a gesture-based keyboard replacement for touchscreens that lets users enter text by moving around a circle. It is meant for phones, remotes and game controllers and mimics handwriting.
HN commenters who used it remember it as an unusually fast and accurate touchscreen text input method and a fascinating alternative to QWERTY.
3 comments from Hacker News
> Sad thing is, that if someone would spend a ton of research and thinking on making something usable and comfortable, most people would completely poopoo it as a freaky unusable layout, just because it would look unfamiliar, lol. Absolutely. 8-Pen was this for Android. (example video here: this video ) It was absolutely, hands down without question, the most accurate way to quickly enter text into a phone using only a screen. Seriously - I could type at about 25-35 wpm on my phone screen at 100% accuracy, one handed. They'd done a ton of work to place letters based on frequency and likely combinations to make typing smooth and relatively fast. No fucking disaster of auto-complete that I have to click to get the word I want, or when you actually have a vocabulary larger than 150 words, but auto-complete is fucking dumb and always picks the most basic option from the path, or when the word you want isn't in the phone dictionary, no hiccups if you want to misssspell something for impact. It was genuinely just the best keyboard I have EVER used on a phone. The downside? It takes about 3 weeks of practice to actually learn, and most people just refuse to try for longer than 10 seconds. I still find it incredibly frustrating that qwerty, of all god-damned things, is the input formula we've picked for phones. It's fucking dumb.
The physical ones (on flip phones) were also 12-key (0-9, *, and #), so I suppose it was just swiping on the keys that was novel. It definitely does leave one to wonder whether that innovation was inspired by this prototype. Since we’re on the topic of input methods: I’ve always found the 8pen [1] fascinating. I sadly never had the opportunity to try it for myself, since I was using an iPhone rather than Android at the time (and it’s since been delisted). [1] this video
I honestly never understood why on earth QWERTY became the standard for touchscreen text input. It's a good keyboard layout but only when the keys are physical and large enough that you can type with two hands without looking at the thing. But it's absolutely godawful when you have to use it with one finger or two thumbs and no feel. All those dictionary-based crutches that were piled on top of it over time don't help, they only exacerbate the problem, especially considering how laughably poorly they work with languages whose grammar is more complex than English. I've been using touchscreen phones since 2011 yet I somehow still make typos all the time. This suggests that the problem isn't me. An ideal touchscreen text input method should embrace the strengths of the medium. Touchscreens allow swipes and gestures, so use that to your advantage! Like in the OP, yes. I myself experimented with a similar concept, except it was a 3x4 grid of square buttons that each can input one of 5 characters, one for tap and the other four for each of the directions, inspired by Japanese keyboards. I tried to use it for a day, it worked, but it felt somewhat unnatural. Maybe I haven't given myself enough time to get used to it, or maybe it was a terrible idea to begin with, or maybe the character layout wasn't optimal (I arranged them alphabetically). Another idea I have is to take the 8pen[1] concept but add more lines, make it 6 or 8, so it's practical for Russian which has 33 letters. Haven