When the iPhone first came out, Richard Kasperowski wanted one. But there was a problem. The keypad on the phone's touch screen uses the traditional keyboard configuration, called "qwerty."

"I thought it would hurt my brain using a qwerty," says the 39-year-old technology director in Cambridge, Mass. He wanted something different. He wanted a Dvorak.

The Dvorak keyboard layout, though around for decades, is as little-known among the general typing population as it is passionately embraced by its devotees. It is to the keyboard what Esperanto is to language and Betamax to videotape. Fans say it lets them type at blazing fast speeds, with less strain on their hands and wrists than typing on a conventional keyboard.

Nobody else cares. From the start, Dvorak enthusiasts have had to fight for respect. It took decades before the Dvorak layout was officially recognized by the American National Standards Institute as an alternative to qwerty. Now Dvorak lovers find themselves in a familiar storyline: A new platform has emerged where typing is essential -- the smart phone -- and the Dvorak layout is once again ignored.

Alec Longstreth, a 30-year-old comic artist from White River Junction, Vt., won't buy a smart phone with a standard keyboard. "I wanted to punch my fist through the computer monitor" every time an advertisement for such a phone popped up, he says.