There's a whole lot of devices like this around at the moment but the keyboard layouts are painful.
Their brand is "no spacebars included", but it absolutely rules out any serious use.
Their brand is "no spacebars included", but it absolutely rules out any serious use.
One advantage to designs like this is the thumbs get to press more keys (2-3 each). I imagine that especially with such a small device, taking up a lot of space when the thumb is just going to press the spacebar in the same place anyway is a poor design choice.
Maybe with the smaller form factor, there'd be more benefit to 'splitting' the 10 alphabetical columns so they're each on the outer 5 columns, which would mean the hands have more spacing between them.
Since it's hackable, I wonder if there's a way for the author to produce and ship a long spacebar that can be switched out for four or five of those keys at the bottom. I assume he has control over everything from the keyboard firmware to the OS, so it seems doable.
Many handheld devices in the age of physical keyboards used grid aligned qwerty keyboards, so it's not unique here.
I think you mean "ortholinear". But yeah, I use a 4x12 ortholinear as by primary keyboard. Took a week or two to get used to, but I prefer this alignment to the usual staggered one now. With staggered rows I always felt like I was kind of guessing where certain keys were. Now every key is either under one of my fingers' resting position, or one key away from one (if you count diagonals as one key distance for tab/return).