5-Tiles Keyboard

Meet the 5-Tiles Keyboard, (yet) another contender taking aim at disrupting Qwerty — and hoping to increase its chances by first targeting smaller wearable devices, such as smartwatches. The rational being that’s a more realistic way to drive a wedge between Qwerty and its users’ fingers.

As challenges go, disrupting Qwerty is akin to attempting to pass Yahweh’s tests in the Grail temple at the end of Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade. The alternative keyboard playing field is littered with the carcasses of those that haven’t made it.

Hands on with 5-Tiles

So how exactly does the 5-Tiles Keyboard work? The letters of the English alphabet are divided into groups of five which are displayed on each tile (it’s four letters plus space for the last tile).

On each tile, the letter that’s most used is underlined. This means you just tap the tile to type that letter. For all other letters a swipe is required. Either a swipe to the right or the left, depending on the letter in question and its relative placement to the underlined letter.

So, for instance, the first tile on the keyboard can either be tapped on, to type the letter ‘e’, or becomes the start point of a swipe right which can extend one tile to the right, to type the letter ‘a’, or all the way to the fifth tile in the row, to type the letter ‘d’.

Most of the tiles also holds shortcut functions for an up swipe or a down swipe — so, for instance, swiping down on the first tile will delete a word, while swiping up will delete a letter. Shift, enter, left and right cursor keys and even a shortcut to a 5-Tiles cheatsheet (which details all the gestures the system supports) are housed as up or down swipes elsewhere.

But, once again, the presence of that cheatsheet points to the thorny learning issue. Learning 5-Tiles is not the work of five seconds, five minutes, or even five hours. It’s going to take a heck of a lot longer than that to forget your Qwerty muscle memory and get fast enough for 5-Tiles’ gesture based typing interface to start feeling useful, not annoying. Certainly if you’re trying to use it on a smartphone, anyway.

TechCrunch witnessed the startup’s co-founder and CEO Michal Kubacki, who came up with the original concept for 5-Tiles way back in 2004 (see below for the full backstory), using the keyboard on his Samsung Galaxy handset and can attest to the fact that he was indeed very quick. But he’s been beavering away on this project for well over five years.

The same could not be said of TechCrunch’s attempts to use 5-Tiles. Painstaking was a more accurate description. Every letter you type has to be individually sought out, and additional gestures — such as a hyphen — can require substantial and rather fiddly paths to be traced over the tiles. Our fingers were certainly not flying o’er the keys.

However, it is undoubtedly true that the speed issue is likely to be less of an irritant on a smartwatch — where the user is unlikely to be typing an epistle anyway. Text input needs on smartwatches are going to be bite-sized, so the learning barrier for 5-Tiles may well be less of a pain point there than elsewhere.

An analogy could be the old school nine-key keypads of first gen mobile devices which spread the alphabet over those keys and required users to multi tap each button to get to the letter they needed. Mobile users managed to learn to type that way, despite how fiddly it was. Needs must, and all that.

So now this startup just needs the smartwatch/wearables category to seriously uplift to drive demand for its alternative keyboard interface. Which is of course another challenge it’s business is facing. If your business is tied to the success of a wearable such as Google Glass you may be hanging around twiddling your thumbs in the short-term.

Five tiles for wearables

And so we come to the 5-Tiles Keyboard: an alternative touchscreen typing interface for Android devices that ditches Qwerty in favour of a roughly alphabetic layout. That’s not the big difference here though.

The startup’s key (ha!) innovation is to reduce the number of keys displayed on the keyboard to five (hence the name), and to switch the letter selection mechanism to a mixture of taps and gestures.

Using gestures allows for individual letter selection to take place, without having to display 26 different keys on the screen. So it can save a lot of screen real estate — something that’s especially pressing on the relatively small screens of smartwatches or indeed other wearables. It reckons its interface could even work on Google Glass.

The use of gestures for inputting characters allows 5-Tiles to incorporate numbers and special characters onto the same keyboard as the alphabet — provided, of course, you can memorise all the hieroglyphs required to squiggle out the different characters.

5-Tiles says its main advantage — aside from taking up less space — is that it can fit a lot of input permutations into that small strip. So it’s small but potent.

It’s not, however, the only alternative keyboard taking aim the smartwatch. Canada’s Minuum has also been flagging up this angle for its alternative keyboard which squishes the entire Qwerty layout into a fraction of the screen space, and uses an auto-correct algorithm to push word suggests at the user, and gesture controls to cycle through suggestions.

Minuum is attempting to make Qwerty work for it. 5-Tiles, on the other hand, presents its users with a much steeper learning challenge since they not only have to learn gestures to input things like numerals but also have to rethink the entire process of how they type.

If you set aside the learning curve challenge, 5-Tiles is undoubtedly offering an elegant solution to the problem of small screens plus Qwerty keyboards — even supporting handy functions like copy and paste within its spectrum of gestures.

But convincing people to make the leap of faith to a new way to type remains a formidable obstacle.