GLOBAL – At the weekend Steve Litchfield over at All About Symbian posted an interesting piece entitled In search of the QWERTY king, in which he goes about exactly that.

Read on to find out more about how he got on, and voice your opinions on the science of QWERTY keyboards right here.

Steve’s criteria in his search for the finest and noblest of QWERTY keyboards was simply as follows:

“I wanted to get to the bottom of which smartphone keyboard, in the Symbian world, at least, was the best, in terms of size, feel, functionality and efficiency. Oh, and I wasn’t allowed to include any obsolete models”

I agree, a decent set of real-world measuring sticks. And in Steve’s dissection of a number of QWERTY handsets including, among ‘others’, the E90, E75, E61i, E71 and N97, is indeed thorough from a numbers perspective – he highlights some interesting (if rather unusual) figures, such as “Distance from centre of ‘Q’ key to centre of ‘P’ key (mm)” and “Key travel (approx, mm, +/- 0.2mm)”, which then are thrown into a rather strange formula to determine its overall score. Now, hats off to Steve for having a stab at creating a set of rules to determine how good a QWERTY keyboard is, and his findings are again interesting – he highlights six devices (five of which are Nokias) with the E90 coming up top, followed by the E75, then the E61i, and the E71 in 5th, followed by N97. What do you reckon?

But can a great QWERTY keyboard really be assessed and measured as successful (or not) by a formula? For example, how do you measure how tactile a QWERTY keyboard is? Or the curve of each key? What do you think? As always, share your opinions below.