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wineandcarbs

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 2, 2008
904
137
What phone did you use prior to the iphone, and how long did it take you to get used to the on-screen keyboard?

Are you a heavy emailer/texter?
 
I had a Blackberry Pearl, Curve, and Bold in the past. I got the iPhone on Saturday, and am completely used to the keyboard. I am in a long distance relatonship, so I text and email a LOT.
 
I email/text/facebook etc all the time from the couch and in meetings. I never had a keyboard phone, so there wasn't a deprogramming curve. I picked it up and it works. It's like the Force. Don't over think it. Just hammer away and it comes out right.
 
I had Samsung Blackjack and could type up a storm on that thing. Switching to the iPhone took a month or two to get used to, but now I feel like I am faster than I was on the Blackjack. The physical keys on that phone were so small!
 
When I got my 3G last year it only took a couple of days to get used to. Like someone above me said, don't think too hard about it; just type and 9 times out of 10 it'll be what you wanted it to be :p
 
Went from a Razr to a Sidekick slide. Then an iPhone 3G and now the 3Gs. I never got too comfortable with the iPhone keyboard until the 3.0 update. Now I fly through texts & emails in landscape mode!
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16)

4 min and 17 secounds....
 
I had a Blackberry Pearl before my iPhone, and that keyboard really helped since it was tiny. When I first got my iPhone, I was able to type 50-60 words per minute within a day, since I was so used to the "cramped" size of the Pearl.

The only thing to really get used to other than size is the feedback. I actually like and prefer the "no feedback" style of the iPhone, seems smoother and less clunky compared to pretty much any phone that isn't touch, and even with touchscreen phones, most of them aren't glass, just plastic.
 
I had nothing but full keyboards in the past and after a few days or texting I got use to the touch screen keyboard and I love it!
 
well, i had a sidekick before i got my original iphone and it only took me about a day before i was typing just as fast as i was with a physical keyboard
 
Never had a QWERTY keyboard phone, but it took about a week to get the hang of how to fly through texting and emails.
 
Not long. I manage wireless devices and have about 10 different ones that I use. I'm not bragging... It means I'm not good on any of them. Muscle memory is a good thing.

However, a vendor came in because they couldn't get the reverse proxies to work (so we could get our mail on the iPhone). He was complaining about the keyboard blah blah blah and asked me to put in my credentials. He saw me whip through it and mumbled something about "getting used to it".
 
I got used to it right away. Like someone else said, jumping from a non keyboard phone probably made the transition easier. I'll also agree with those who said one of the important things to remember is to just go ahead and hammer away on it. Occasionally, a friend will borrow mine to look something up. I see them carefully pecking, trying to hit each letter just right. I tell them to stop doing that, just let it fly, then go back and correct the mistakes, if there are any.
 
Maybe a week or two. You just have to trust yourself more than you're aiming at the right spot. I'm not a heavy e-mailer or texter. But when I do type in those, I like to go pretty fast since I can do 80 wpm on a real keyboard. The landscape keyboard is almost its own monster since the keys are more spread apart.

Either way, I prefer that to the BlackBerry keyboards. Some of those models have keys that are SO TINY!
 
2 years and counting. Luckily I'm not a heavy texter so it works fine for my use. If I were really into texting I might opt for a different phone but everything else about the Iphone is so fantastic I can suffer.
 
Use the force, that is good advice above.

You have to stop trying to watch yourself type. This is why hardware keyboards are extremely over-rated. People don't type by touch, they type by memorization the location of the keys. The tactile feedback makes no real difference in ones ability to hit the same location over and over again.

If I took a hardware keyboard and moved the keys .5mm further apart, people would have trouble typing on it, until they adjusted and started hitting the new locations of the keys, which have to be memorized again.

Just type and you will see with auto-correction you can be pretty aggressive. If you sit there and watch as you type and try to correct it as you go, it will be painfully slow.
 
I had a Razr, so it was pretty much instantaneous with me.

I picked it up very quickly and have only gotten faster. The 3G S allows me to be even that much faster.
 
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