Your thumbs may travel more or less the same distance, but it’s a totally different feel. What is undeniable is that the typing experience on the iPhone is very different than that on a hardware-keyboard phone. And if it’s worse, I’ll bet it’s not by much. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out that the average typing speed of iPhone owners is about the same, or even faster, than that of people with hardware-keyboard phones. I, for one, type pretty well on it, and but I saw some people at WWDC last month whose iPhone typing speed simply blew me away.
#APPLE KEYPAD MOBILE SOFTWARE#
Rather, my argument is more along the lines of: (1) that all phone-size keyboards - hardware or software - are poor compared to real honest-to-god full-size put-your-eight-fingers-across-the-home-row-keys keyboards but (2) given a week or two of use and some trust in the auto-correct system, most people can thumb-type just as well, if not better, on an iPhone as they could on a BlackBerry or a slider-style keyboard like the G1’s. I.e., my argument is not that the iPhone keyboard is poor compared to hardware phone keyboards but that it’s an acceptable trade-off. What I think I wasn’t clear about before, when I argued that the iPhone’s software keyboard is not holding it back - is that some people are extremely fast iPhone typists, and most iPhone users do just fine with it. Staff meetings and coffee shops and watching them power-thumb IPhone users will be sitting next to them in departure lounges and
#APPLE KEYPAD MOBILE ANDROID#
But you know, it’s a great big honking niche that includesĪ ton of Android and Blackberry and now Palm Pre users.
I could draw parallels with Apple’s lengthy and deeply misguidedĬonviction that one button on a mouse is enough. But it’s worth noting that HTC’s follow-up to the G1, the Magic, has no hardware keyboard.īray, arguing that Apple is making a mistake by not offering a hardware keyboard, writes: I think it’s safe to say that RIM, for example, isn’t going away any time soon, and their foray into software keyboard models has not gone well (to say the least). I’m convinced the answer is no - that (a) there will never be an iPhone with a built-in hardware keyboard and (b) Apple will not suffer for it.īut that’s not to say that I think hardware keyboards will go away industry-wide. I think the question boils down to whether Apple is making a mistake by not making an iPhone with a hardware keyboard. That doesn’t include a physical keyboard. Bray owns and very much likes an HTC Android G1, and writes:Īs of now, I will absolutely not consider using any such device I missed it while I was at WWDC last month, but Tim Bray wrote a thoughtful piece regarding whether hardware keyboards are an important feature. Mobile Phone Keyboards Tuesday, 7 July 2009
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