I've been up since 4am, woken yet again by the tingling in my hands as my fingers go numb. I've been to the doc about it. She says it's Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, one of the nastier forms of RSI, and I know what's causing it: it's my iPhone.
I've had RSI for years, but for a long time I've kept it at bay with good ergonomics, carefully chosen keyboards and mice and regular breaks.
The iPhone has changed all that, though: when I'm not at my desk I'm giving my phone a damn good thumbing, scrolling through RSS feeds or catching up on tweets. And that's seriously damaging my hands. For all its joys, multi-touch can be an ergonomic disaster area.
Could the Apple iPad be even worse? I think it could. We'll be getting a 9.7-inch touchscreen boasting multi-touch and a virtual keyboard, and if it's anything like the one on the iPhone - which I'm sure it will be - then that virtual keyboard's going to take up roughly half of the screen.
Make your own pain-bringer
It's easy to see what that would be like: find a 10-inch netbook and imagine the keyboard has been scaled down 50% and all the keys glued to the case.
Don't have a netbook handy? Take a sheet of A4 and fold it in half to make it A5. Now, fold it again so it's wider than it is tall. That's your keyboard. Try typing on it. Maybe throw in some finger scrolling, some pinching and grabbing too. Uncomfortable, isn't it?
It can't be anything other than uncomfortable at that size, because there simply isn't enough room for properly sized keys like the ones you'll find on Apple's current (and exceptionally comfortable) keyboards.
It's likely, then, that typing on the iPad will be uncomfortable. At the risk of sounding like a character from The Day Today, Uncomfortable plus time equals pain.
Although tablet computing isn't exactly new - it's been around in PC form since the turn of the century, and of course we've had stylus-based computing in PDAs for years before that - decent tablet computing is a brand new thing.
If Apple's iPad is as good as all Steve Jobs claims, then people will be spending an awful lot of time using it. Do we know what the consequences of that will be? Has Apple been testing it with numb-fingered people like me to see whether it exacerbates RSI? I'd love to think so, but I very much doubt it.
But let's face it: if this thing costs a thousand quid I'm not going to be in the market for one any time soon. But the odds are that, as with the iPhone, some iPad lovers are going to discover that love hurts.
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Your comments (12) Click to add a new comment
kasino72
January 28th
12. I've always wondered if you can get RSI in your jaws :)
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d4lien
January 28th
11. I reckon a whole load of Apple fans will already be suffering from RSI from all the jabbering they do providing Jobs and Apple with free marketing... Their jaws must be aching.
Okay bad joke but still... Come on... Come on...
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kasino72
January 28th
10. Now that I've seen it - and I'm not the only one who noticed that even Steve Jobs can't type properly on it - I still think it's going to be painful to use with that virtual keyboard. But I really like the hardware keyboard dock - that's enough to move the iPad from "no chance" to "buy buy buy" for me.
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psyfur
January 28th
9. Great to see an author replying to critics, good on ya gary
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kasino72
January 22nd
8. I'm a bit worried that I'm coming across as arsey here, because I don't mean to be. I fear my making-a-point skills have temporarily deserted me, because the argument I was trying to make is basically this: we know what we're doing RSI-wise with traditional PC setups, but multitouch is a whole new beast - and given the size we're pretty sure the tablet will be, users will need to watch what they're doing in way, say, iMac users won't.
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kasino72
January 22nd
7. Healeydave: "However you interact with this new product is irrelivant though, because there's a clue in the name of RSI, I guess I need to spell it out too, its the first word "REPETITIVE"."
There's more to it than that, which is why ergonomics exists. Some things - eg crappy keyboards, badly laid out kit, software that requires excessive mouse use/travel - are bigger RSI factors than others.
Pete_L: "If you want the CTS to go away (eventually), stop using it - it's merely a phone, it's not life-and-death."
That's what I'm doing.
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