This keyboard could make smartwatches actually useful

Disclosure: This story resulted from a trip paid for by CES.

The good ol’ QWERTY keyboard has stood resilient. Many tried to kill it, but no one has succeeded. Its perseverance kept it alive even in the smartphone era, despite the problem of fat fingers.

But it may have met its match. Watchfaces are simply horrible for precise finger tapping. As such, most smartwatches rely on dials or voice recognition, but these limit the watch’s functionality. Siri, for example, is still horrible at recognizing names and slang. A keyboard could come in handy here.

This is certainly an opening for a startup to enter, and TouchOne hopes to make a breakthrough.

It has introduced a surprisingly elegant keyboard for Android smartwatches, inspired by the T9 predictive keyboard. Yes, the very keyboard used in basic brick phones.

The TouchOne smartwatch keyboard uses a mix of eight keys and touch gestures to allow people to key in words, punctuation, and even emoticons. They can simply tap for space, swipe left to delete, swipe down to enter, and swipe up to shift.

Hu Jingtao, the founder of the Australian company, claims anyone can learn to use the keyboard in two minutes. Users can achieve up to 32 words a minute, comparable to smartphone typing speeds. It’s unclear how proficient they’ll need to be to get there though.

But due to the limitations of Android Wear, any smartwatch keyboard can only be used within third-party apps. TouchOne is developing an SMS app to overcome this.

As novel as it is, the startup faces many hurdles. The mass adoption of smartwatches is far from certain. Apple Watch sales are middling, and smartwatches remain an accessory rather than a must-have. Woeful battery life is another limitation preventing smartwatches from becoming a powerful computing platform.

Nonetheless, TouchOne could be part of the solution to make the wearable an essential tool for the masses. It’s not the only one trying to crack this. iBeezi is attempting a smartwatch keyboard, but for Chinese speakers.

Another problem is that voice recognition could improve to a point where a keyboard might not be necessary. Google and Apple have the wherewithal to make this happen, although it could be years before they get there.

Finally, it’s unclear how useful this keyboard is in daily life. I’m not a smartwatch user, so I can’t verify TouchOne’s claims. The lack of physical grooves limits its usefulness when typing without looking.