Texting Is Slow

1 Response to Texting Is Slow

1. Scott says:

   May 9, 2007 at 3:13 pm

   Reminds me of vi or vim against a modern windows editor or IDE. Vim editing is a lot faster, but almost no one these days is willing to spend the time to learn it well enough to climb the learning curve, so it doesn’t get used much. Imagine if every teenager had to learn Morse Code to send text messages on their phones–I don’t think it would get used too much.

   I like to look for flaws in the methodology of little experiments like these, though. For one thing, the teens in this video don’t have 38 years of experience texting, so maybe it would have been more fair to put them up against a pair with 5 years Morse Code experience. Also, they had a proper, full sized Morse Code key device. It would have been interesting to see them try Morse Code using a button on a cell phone. It wouldn’t be very hard to write a Java mobile midlet to run on the phone that would accept Morse Code entry, but I doubt it would be nearly as fast. I timed the Morse Code guy at about 20 seconds. I was able to type it in under 10 on my keyboard, and about 33 texting on my phone. Perhaps someone with a blackberry or a phone with an a-z mini-keyboard can time themselves and post what they get, just for curiosity sake.

   If you want to try, the sentence they sent is, “I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance.”

   All that being said, it was still surprising that the Morse Coders were so fast relative to the texters, or at least it was the first time I heard about it.

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