Microsoft's one-handed Arc soft keyboard finally makes it out of the labs, heading to iOS

4 years ago we posted an exclusive image of a new soft keyboard by Microsoft Research which would allow easy one-handed typing.  The keyboard was designed for one-handed thumb typing without having to look and features several keys clustered together, leveraging disambiguation to decide what word is in fact being typed.

Unfortunately the keyboard never made it to a production device, leading to many believing we made it up.

According to Thurrott.com however we may finally be vindicated as the keyboard is now heading to a smartphone near you! Of course not to your actual smartphone, but we are sure there are many people around you who have an iPhone.

Paul Thurrott reports the new feature will be part of the new Wordflow keyboard for iOS and that Microsoft is currently beta testing it, with a presumed public release soon.

There’s not much more to say about this, except as another example of how the best Microsoft experiences are increasingly on non-Microsoft platforms.