"Qwerty" keyboards against usability

Our "Qwerty" keyboards were invented in late 1870's by Remington.
The layout has been designed this way because the old mechanical typewritters, using an alphabetical order, would easily get their keys jam as typists were typing too fast.
So Remington created a way to place consecutive keys as far as possible one from each other to slow down the typing speed and hence, avoid keys to get stuck together.

So today we're still using a 130 years old keyboard layout that was designed to slow down the typist!
Other companies came up with intuitive keyboards layout but could never make a break out on the market!
Like XPert. Here is their keyboard layout.

As they say on their website:

The XPert Keyboard moves only two high frequency letters, A + N (not six) and adds a second E key (the most common letter at 13%). The change is easy to learn. And it optimizes key sequences to be struck by opposite hands, the fastest way of typing. With these 3 moves, the XPeRT keyboard goes from digraph disabled to speed enabled.

=> Their keyboard layout is not so different from the "Qwerty" layout which would make it easy to learn

There's been also the Dvorak project with a totally different layout.

According to what they say on their website:

Easier, Healthier. Your fingers travel over the keys using only one half to two thirds the movement required with the standard keyboard. Fully 70% of all letters used are on the ‘home row’, and work is shared logically between the various fingers, according to frequency of use. The Dvorak keyboard is designed to naturally draw in to use all fingers of the hand.

Enjoy saving 35% to 50% of both your time, and finger movement. This is 17 - 30 minutes of movement saved, every hour you type. An 8 hour day, translates from 2 hours, 36 minutes, up to 4 hours of typing movement saved.

Here is an interesting chart taken from XPert Website:


Anyways, both of these projects are hosted on extremly ugly websites! If their sales forces are as sexy as their websites, then I'm not surprised we're still using "Qwerty" keyboards.

To close this post and staying in the same subject. I've been amazed to discover some years ago the concept of projected keyboards (as the Celluon one) which allows you to do not have to carry with you a large keyboard to type for a small device such as mobile phones / PDAs/ BlackBerriess...
I'm not sure wether or not it is easy to use, if someone tried already I'd be happy to read his feedbacks.

And bellow is a quick explanation of the concept.