Comments on: Review: Silkyboard II

Looks great for a Handera 330 user :D!

Well as long as everyone's posting their favorites, here's mine: Quicktype, avaiable on PalmGear. Fully customizable. Print your own overlays. I set mine up similar to the FITALY keyboard. Printed the overlay on post-it note tape, then covered over that with clear mailing tape, then applied that to my graffiti area. Only the post-it note tape actually touches my screen and it's easily removed, leaves no residual on screen.

I've reviewed SilkyBoard I at Pen Computing and Fitaly on a website.

I would rate the comparison between the 2:
SB 2 stars
FS 4 stars

I prefer Fitaly by a long margin. Once past the inital learning curve FS is well worth it. I get an easy 50wpm (70 peak at the competition), and use it as a great middle ground between the keyboard and grafitti. (those time when you need to jot down a few paragraphs but cant sit down to type).

Grafitti, Fitaly and Keyboard all has it's place on my machine. I dont find SB fast enough or accurate enough to make it worth it.

Fitaly is not at all a niche. I've set up some non-geek friends with Palms and always stick FitalyStamp on for them...they all love it! A QWERTY layout makes no sense on a Palm, particularly for people that touch type. You do not know the layout visually if you touch type, it is all muscle memory. So regardless of which layout on the Palm, you are going to be looking for the letters. With a small amount of practice, most people will be much faster using Fitaly than a QWERTY layout simply because the letters tend to be near each other, rather than all over the place. I also find the stamp very attractice to look at, and has all kinds of cool additional features, like sliding for caps, plus punctuation and numbers all easily available.

I use McPhling and a few other hacks with silkyboard and they all work fine. I haven't tried the Fitaly stamp but I did try the fitaly kbd but I preferred to keep my keyboard knowledge in sync with the PC desktop. Cuts down on the confusion (maybe it's an age thing :-}

The QWERTY keyboard was specifically designed to be INEFFICIENT. Think back to the days of old manual typewriters... if you hit two letters to quickly, the levers would jam. I know it's the same letter arrangement as on your computer, but that's a stupid reson to prefer it. You can't touchtype on a Palm...

FITALY has common groups of letters paired together. It's specifically made for stylus typing (poking letters with a single stick as opposed to having many fingers working. If you're looking for the next letter you need, look near the one you just hit... it's almost always there.

www.fitaly.com had a contest where any text entry could be used to type in a certain test phrase to measure words per minute with different text entry methods. FitalyStamp averaged 58 WPM, on-screen fitaly averaged 51WPM, on-screen QWERTY averaged 36WPM, grafitti averaged 36 WPM. The number of Qwerty entries was low, so results may be better or worse... I would like to see what kind of results silkyboard produces, just out of curiousity. Maybe it's faster and I'm blowing smoke out of my behind...

Source: http://www.fitaly.com/domperignon/domperignon2.htm

Same poster here. Just ordered new TapPad overlays for Clie ($8 shipped). Very much like TapPad's special keys and features, plus it doesn't block access to the app icons I'm so used to hitting.

Will wait on Silkyboard until it's $15 or so somehwere/someday.

First poster here yet again. Received new TapPad templates in one day (forgot Brochu was in Massachusetts as am I -- even in the same region of the state).

Agreed that Silky is more powerful, but also more complex and requiring a greater change of long-held habits. For example, with TapPad I still tap the original icons for Home, Menu, Calculator, and Search.

If I entered huge amounts of text on the handheld, I'd reconsider, but as of now I don't do that.