Tap both thumb and index and you get an N. By tapping fingers in certain combinations, you can enter text, letter by letter. It’s a strange-looking device, resembling something like a high-tech knuckleduster that fits onto the hand, with a sensor on each finger and a Bluetooth connection to your phone or laptop.
The Tap resembles a prop from an early ’90s cyberpunk movie. And, for those of us who try to ride the train called language for a living, that’s a useful platform to stand on. We may still be tied to our computers, but these products provide alternative ways to enter text that can help spark the creativity that we crave. Switching to one of the pen-based tablets provided a much more focused way to write without interruptions, and importing work into the computer afterwards was pretty easy. Using speech recognition to dictate a paragraph, for instance, gave my aching wrists some time to recover. While none of these products could completely replace my keyboard, they did provide interesting alternatives, and a change can be as good as a rest. I used two devices that employ “smart pens” and found them great for scribblers and note–takers, but both were quite dependent on good penmanship: If you have a scrawly, illegible hand, they won’t be able to translate your spider scribbles into text. It had a huge amount of neo-Luddite, focused writing charm, but the handwriting-to-text conversion isn’t perfect.
I tested a desktop tablet that lets you write longhand on an E Ink screen, converting your scribbles into text on the computer screen. The dictation software I used was surprisingly effective, but talking to myself all day made me feel like a lunatic. Each comes with benefits that make some things easier and more comfortable, but make other tasks more difficult. So, do any of these products really replace the keyboard for me? No.
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