There’s a joke that does the rounds, about a teenager being given a dial phone and being unable to make head nor tail of it. Whether or not it’s true, we’re guessing that the same teen might be just a stumped by this year’s keyboard oddity from Google Japan. It replaces keys with a series of dials that work in the same way as the telephone dial of old. Could you dial your way through typing?
All the files to make the board, as well as a build guide, are in the GitHub repository linked above, but they’ve also released a promotional video that we’ve put below the break. The dials use 3D printed parts, and a rotary encoder to detect the key in question. We remember from back in the day how there were speed dialing techniques with dial phones, something we’ve probably by now lost the muscle memory for.
We like this board for its quirkiness, and while it might become a little tedious to type a Hackaday piece on it, there might be some entertainment for old-timers in watching the youngsters figuring it out. If you’re hungry for more, we’ve covered them before.
Thanks [ikeji] for the tip.
Is this video real or satire? I love it
That entire GBoard YouTube channel is a bunch of tongue-in-cheek fun videos. Turn on captions to see just how many puns they’re flinging.
Yes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WazA77xcf0A
It really cool!
What’s going on with the Japanese that everything seems to be spinning for them?
I suspect there’s an rf jammer designed to block psychic abilities in the region. alternating current has the tendency to make objects rotate, and brass screws unscrew from fuse boards, but it could also be along the lines of junji ito’s uzumaki, a dark future where we all spiral together into degenerative extinction.
All independent developers HAVE to supply a government issued ID. For safety and shit.
…Oh and also they are required to use this dial keyboard.
WTF was that???! And yea, why are they all rotisserie-ing while talking?
The Gboard app for Android has recently become dramatically unstable. They’re changing around a lot of UI details that had been consistent for years, and ignoring app hints that have worked for more than a decade. And they’re introducing a ton of bugs — sporadic settings loss, lag, etc. It’s one of the reasons i think this website’s focus on some mild restriction on side loading is completely unhinged. Android truly is crossing lines to enter the territory of villainous unusability, but the real failures are being ignored. Core apps are becoming gratuitously unusable. Google is clearly abandoning the idea of caring about customer experience.
Anyways I’m bringing this up because this project somehow has the Gboard name on it, which makes me wonder if the senior Gboard team has abandoned software development for youtube content creation, leaving some unsupervised interns to wreak the havoc we’ve been experiencing.
I once showed my typewriter to a friend only 5 years younger than me. It was fun seeing him struggle to get a sheet of paper in. His girlfriend had still used one of those, and she flipped the lever, put the sheet in, aligned the edges to make the paper straight, flipped the lever back and her only problem was finding the carriage unlock lever (which is hard to find on my model). It’s stark to see the difference between a first time-user and a has-not-used-this-technology-often-and-not-at-all-in-30-years-user.
Teenager? These days it’s good odds any given 30 year old has never used a rotary phone.
I’m 46 and while I know how to use them i can’t recall ever needing to use one
i’m 45 and when i was a kid my dad went to the store and shook every phone until he found one that had a real bell in it. so i have used a rotary dial :)
My grandsons were unable to use a rotary phone. Not yet teenagers at the time.