David Gaskill

Hong Kong

Consultant

My hands are quite big. As there is no technology on the horizon for miniaturising them a qwerty keyboard needs to be at least 10 inches across if I'm going to use all my fingers to type. This is not going to fit into my pocket.

For a long time keyboards have been the best way of converting words to text but this era is coming to an end. I am dictating this to my computer at a speed which the most accomplished typist could not rival. We all have inbuilt technology for converting thoughts to audio. A large and slow transducer to enable me to use my fingers to produce text seems almost medieval in 2008.

Bill Gates has been banging on about speech recognition for yonks and something like BlackBerry seems to me to be crying out for it. The technology to incorporate accurate, user independent, speech recognition to a device the size of BlackBerry isn't here yet but it's probably not too far away. I really don't understand why Mr Lazaridis wants to go back to the last century or maybe the century before. Maybe he's also considering the reintroduction of quills?

David Gaskill