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. 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. 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-finger-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, 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. 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. And if it’s worse, I’ll bet it’s not by much.
What is undeniable is that the typing experience on the iPhone is very different than that on a hardware-keyboard phone. Your thumbs may travel more or less the same distance, but it’s a totally different feel. The people who seem to struggle the most with the iPhone keyboard are those who’ve spent the most time thumb-typing with hardware keyboards. And that works both ways: when I got the chance to use a Pre for 30 minutes or so last month, I could not type for shit on it with my thumbs, but yet I’m quite certain that if I lived with a Pre for a few weeks I’d be typing well enough.
Allow me to play oddball here and assert that while I prefer the iPhone touchscreen keyboard over the tacky, minature slider-style (or even non-slider-style), I still rate the old Palm/Handspring Grafitti handwriting recognition as superior. I could bang out text almost as rapidly as typing on a real keyboard (and I am a nimble typist). Those PDA devices of yesteryear required the use of a stylus, but I conclude there is no reason that such mechanics could not be replicated on the fullscreen iPhone touchpad.
After 2 years with the iPhone, my typing has improved, and I believe I would struggle with a BlackBerry, where those tiny keys would annoy me to no end. And recently, with the advent of iPhone OS 3.0 (delivering a speedup and hitherto sorely omitted copy/paste functionality), my iPhone keyboard acumen is taking great strides. I believe the exercise of select text fiddling is improving my fingertip agility. The copy and paste mechanics at first seemed awkward, but by golly, I think I’m getting the hang of it.
Is the physical keyboard v. touchscreen keyboard the new holy war in the same vein as Mac v. Windows, emacs v. vi, GNOME v. KDE, etc.?
