The future of keyboards

I love a good laptop keyboard - the feel of the buttons under my fingers, the gentle sound of tapping, the subtle, tactile feedback, the contained arrangement of keys, the elegant flatness.

I hate typing on the iPhone. It's too cramped. So many times 'A's become 'S's and vice versa. So much auto-correcting. So many missed autocorrects that I then need to aend an additional text for.

*send.

I seldom spell a google search on my iPhone perfectly. "Did you mean...?" You know I did.

And yet, my instinct is not to go to Siri every time. I don't want to broadcast every single text of mine to the world. I hardly like taking phone calls in public.

But I know some think voice is the future. I don't disagree. But I also don't think books will go away - so in the same vein, there will be room for keyboards.

Those projection keyboards look cool, but the reviews are mixed. The 'airplane magazine' nature of it (the reviewer nailed it), the fact that it requires an entirely different device, that it sounds like you're pushing buttons on a microwave, and that it's pretty inaccurate are all signs to me that the technology isn't there yet.

Voice certainly isn't perfect, either, but it has the benefit of learning in the wild that will help improve it over time. An effective projection keyboard will need to be available on the phone or tablet itself (no extra device), offer some more pleasant kind of feedback, and fix its accuracy.

Until then, voice looks the most promising for conveying text. The other senses don't really have a horse in this race. Unless you count Google Glasses resurgence. I'm not convinced.