The piece elicited a variety of reactions — even Roger Ebert seems to think it might be too late to learn a new keyboard. I also received a fair number of follow-up emails pointing out some interesting technologies that I’d missed.

So here are some other options for the touchscreen-averse:

Talk Emo to Me

A company called Siine is trying make touchscreen typing even quicker by replacing words or entire phrases with emoticons.

The Siine Writer app is based on editable icons. Each icon, or “Siine,” is supposed to convey three different words or phrases, depending on how many times the user taps it.

So, instead of typing out a text-laden message, users tap a series of visual cues that send the message to the person on the receiving end.

Users make the Siines by downloading the app from the Android market, going to the emoticon screen, holding down an emoticon and selecting “create,” to assign a new picture, a name and the corresponding text for the emoticon. After that, the Siine emoticon will appear on the user’s keyboard.

It’s a pretty nifty idea, though there would likely still be a need to enter text for more random words, and words used less frequently.

Siine is based in London and Barcelona; the company launched in 2007, and received funding last February from Atomico, the VC firm of Niklas Zennstrom, best known for co-founding Skype.

The free app is available in both English and Spanish for devices running Android OS. There’s also a tablet version of the app, available exclusively from Samsung Apps; at the moment, there isn’t a Siine app available for iPhone or iPad.

The Next Productivity Killer at Work

Here’s a familiar sequence of events: You’re typing away at your desk, and your phone pings — loudly — alerting you and the rest of the office to the fact that you’ve got a message. You’re in the middle of doing work, so you ignore it. But you don’t, really: You glance at your phone’s interface, quickly, just to check. But, wait — it’s your friend, asking if you want in on tickets that are going to sell out in exactly 47 seconds. Or it’s your significant other, asking if you could meet the handyman at the apartment. Or it’s your mom. You simply have to respond.

What if you could just keep typing on your desktop keyboard — and still respond to your urgent calls?

That’s the kind of keyboard Matias has come up with.

The Canada-based company uses Bluetooth technology to wirelessly connect your phone to your keyboard and toggle between your desktop screen and phone — you’re still typing on your keyboard, but the text is appearing on the screen of your smartphone. (Here’s a video from CES that shows how this works, courtesy of Engadget.)

There are three Matias models — the $79 Slim One Keyboard, the $99 One Keyboard and the $199 Tactile One Keyboard — and all of them work on both PCs and Macs. The One and the Slim One are available now; the Tactile One will begin shipping in May.

The cheapest model, the Slim One, does not include a hub for your phone. The $99 One Keyboard includes a USB 2.0 hub and in-keyboard stand to hold your phone. The $199 Tactile One Keyboard has all of that, plus Alps mechanical key switches, which means there are real switches under each key.

And for those of you who wrote to me and suggested the Dvorak style of keyboard as an alternative to the traditional keyboard layout — Matias also makes a Dvorak keyboard for PCs and Mac computers.

Projecting Into the Future

We’ve seen at least one example of a laser-projection device that can create a keyboard out of any opaque surface. But what if you could make a keyboard out of any surface? What if you could make a keyboard … out of thin air?

MicroVision, a company specializing in laser-display technology, announced earlier this month the availability of its new laser-display engine, the PicoP Gen 2 HD laser display (the company’s patented display, PicoP, is actually the tech behind OmniTouch, mentioned in the previous article.)

The Gen 2 display takes it a step further: MicroVision’s PicoP Gen 2 can turn any projected image into a virtual touchscreen, regardless of the surface it’s being projected onto — or whether there’s even any surface at all. The PicoP Gen 2 HD laser display engine boasts 720p HD image projection and interactive displays up to 200 inches diagonal. MicroVision also announced technology for 3-D projectors, which could project 3-D images from a small display device.

While this kind of technology might have a more obvious place in the gaming market, it can also be used in conjunction with mobile devices to allow users to “step away from the screen.”

The company is emphasizing that this is still a prototype; MicroVision expects to begin sending samples to selected manufacturers for testing sometime early this year.

(There aren’t any images of this technology being deployed, so you’ll just have to imagine that keyboard in thin air for now.)

Forget the Keyboard — It’s All About Voice

Still other readers threw the four-letter word at me. Not that one. They were talking about Siri — and her competitors — saying they believe that touchscreen technologies, tactile or otherwise, are all moot because of the emergence of voice-command technology. Voice recognition is now in smartphones, gaming consoles and “smart” TV sets; is it only a matter of time before we’re dictating everything to our computer screens?

The idea behind Snapkeys isn’t new; the company says it has been working on it for more than 10 years.

A snapshot of Snapkeys' redesigned keyboard.

But the more recent emergence of touchscreen devices — and the complaints from even avid users about typing on them — means that Snapkeys’ research and development has been serendipitously well-timed.

“We think the end user is finally ready for an upgrade to the old Qwerty keyboard, after almost 150 years,” said Ryan Ghassabian, a Snapkeys business development manager. “Today, there are just too many new devices — phones, tablets — that are changing everything.”

“And Qwerty is just not meant to be on touchscreen devices,” he added.

Snapkeys is just one of a growing number of devices and applications that aim to change the way users interact with the traditional keyboard.

That doesn’t necessarily mean altering the layout of the Qwerty keyboard. The popular keyboard add-on Swype, recently acquired by Nuance, uses a standard layout, but lets users trace a word with their fingers.

While many companies work on technology for onscreen keyboards, still others are trying to create smart, ultra-portable or “invisible” keyboards.

Celluon's Magic Cube laser-projected keyboard.

Korea-based Celluon, which works on portable input applications, has introduced a “Magic Cube” device that connects wirelessly to an iPad or iPhone and projects a laser keyboard image onto an opaque surface for users to “type” on. The idea is that the user would only have to tote the palm-sized, battery-operated cube around, instead of a full keyboard.

Mozilla Labs’s Seabird project uses two Pico projectors to spit out keyboard imagery on either side of a smartphone to establish a full keyboard for typing.

Others believe the answer to typing on touchscreens lies in somehow adding a tactile set of keys — ones that people can actually feel, as they’re accustomed to — to those sleek glass displays.

Part of this stems from the simple fact that many consumers find typing on raised keys easier than typing on touchscreens. A study conducted last year at the University of Washington’s Information School in conjunction with Microsoft Research found that when users typed on a flat surface lacking tactile feedback, they were subject to inadvertent touches, and typing speed was 31 percent slower than it was with a physical keyboard.

Five years ago, manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung were trying everything from vibrating screens to sensor pads underneath keys to create the sensation of keys you could feel on touchscreens.

And consumers seem to want options beyond just attaching a full keyboard to a mobile phone or tablet. Last fall, two Seattle-based designers received $201,400 dollars in pledges on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, after having set an initial goal of just $10,000. Their product: A thin, light keyboard overlay called the TouchFire that goes over the iPad’s touchscreen and creates a sense of keys.

But tactile touchscreen tech still hasn’t made its way into the mainstream.

While physical buttons certainly have their advantages, software keyboards, in the meantime, are showing a tremendous amount of potential. For example, keyboards can simply be reconfigured based on context. When in a browser, dedicated keys can be presented for “www” and “.com”. If the entry is for a ZIP code, a screen with only numbers can be offered.

Also, soft keyboards can do interesting things using prediction. Based on what the next character is likely to be, the software can actually assume which letter is likely to be pressed next, making those keys bigger, either physically or just by favoring those keys.

Above all, software keyboards, unlike physical ones, disappear entirely when they are not needed. The trend away from physical keyboards, which began with the iPhone, has continued unabated, with full touchscreen smartphones making up a steadily increasing portion of the market.

Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. candidate in Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute, says that while tactile feedback is “kind of the holy grail of input,” we’re still years away from tech that offers true tactility on touchscreens. “Right now, there are ways you can take really inaccurate input and make it usable — look at something like BlindType — so that’s what you’ll see getting pushed out in the next two or three years. Maybe in five years or more, we’ll see the technological breakthrough of ‘shape-shifting’ the keys on touch surfaces, so people can feel them.”

OmniTouch: A new kind of "Palm" phone?

Harrison has spent the past two and a half years working with Microsoft on skin-sensory computing technology, called Skinput. The technology includes specialized sensors that gauge vibrations happening inside of the human body and enable graphical multitouch. The idea, basically, is that by tapping a projected image on your forearm, you can tell your computer — or another electronic device, like your TV — what to do.

More recently, Harrison and Microsoft have retailored the tech, which is now called OmniTouch, to use it on variety of surfaces — not just the epidermis, but also walls, tables, and notepads.

And while Harrison is laser-focused on changing the way we input information, he expressed a different sentiment than Snapkeys does it when it comes to the keyboard.

“The physical keyboard is an amazing thing, and the fact that it hasn’t changed much in almost 150 years is a good thing,” he said. “If you brought back an old keyboard, people will still be able to type just as well, and there aren’t many technologies as durable as that.”

Readers, which do you prefer for typing: Touchscreens or tactile keys?

(Magic Cube photo courtesy of Flickr/AsiaClassified)

AllThingsD’s Ina Fried contributed to this report.