wow that must have taken a while to type on the iphone! Do you like the virtual keyboard? Do you find it takes a while to type, or just about the same as a trio or something...?
You'll have to pardon my laborious response but I think it's important to take a step back and lay some foundation so you really see why I have the opinion I do of the keyboard...
I'm a rather fast typer as it is... but I hate the Treo and the Blackberry. In fact, I've hated PDA's so vehemently I originally refused to buy one until speech to text dictation was incorporated and highly accurate.
I'm typing this from my laptop just so I can get a lot of thoughts through faster... my previous post was just to serve as a sort of "proof of concept" that hey, look, I'm using the iPhone to do this... and it works well.
Here's the thing... I haven't spent much time on a Treo or Blackberry, chiefly because three minutes of fiddling with pulldown menus, etc. drove me up the freaking wall. The interfaces are so nonintuitive that whatever speed is gained on the keyboard is lost in other areas of productivity.
Where most companies tend to approach the problem of UI design like this, "Everyone likes small keyboards, we need a small physical keyboard," that doesn't really solve any problems other than how to be like the next guy to hopefully squeeze out some sales. But innovation requires a different mindset... The kind of mindset that asks, "How and why did it come to BE this way?"
We weren't always using small keyboards. There was a time people had to get used to them. How and why did we go that route? Is there a better way?
Well, there are tremendous gains in productivity and speed from navigating the iPhone interface and those cannot be overlooked... web browsing is ridiculously easy, navigating with depth-nested menus (click an icon, the next set of nested options takes its place, etc.) instead of two-dimensional small-print pull downs that could be endlessly messy and hard to immediately spot where you want go... and so on.
So then we come to the keyboard and it seems like a lot of people think this is going to slow you down. I submit to you that in less than a day I was typing faster on it than the Treo I wanted to throw through the window.
The key is, and this is not Apple RDF or fluff... you really do benefit by starting slow. This will give you time to see how the thing responds, where the buttons are, get the feel for how the auto-correction works, etc, without reading a tutorial. You can read all the tutorials you want, but there's no substitute for patience and experience... you might not notice something if you try going too fast. For example: In a few minutes I noticed that if I hit the wrong key and DON'T lift my finger but slide it to the correct key, wait a fraction of a sec for the key "blowup" confirmation and THEN release, it'll register that letter instead. A physical keyboard WON'T do this... fatfinger and "slide" over and you'll have two keystrokes and need to correct one of them.
Then you've got the autocorrection... It works similar to T9 prediction but a little smarter because the correcting word appears next to, not inline with, the text you're typing. Knowing when to hit the spacebar to accept the correction will seriously speed you up.
So Apple probably approached the problem by first trying to make the overall user experience a lot more direct... there's nothing more intuitive to a human being than manipulating objects in the real world and developing direct hand-eye motor coordination skill. Psych studies show that toddlers who play educational video games do not learn nearly as fast as kids who get more physical hands-on input in the real world. The problem is not the nature of simulation itself... it's how simulation is done. In those educational games, as long as they keep mashing a button eventually some button will produce the right result and often the wrong button will not produce a detrimental response.
Look at the iPhone interface... when you scroll slowly, there's no retained momentum... scroll-stop. Apply more force, and there's momentum... screen keeps scrolling a while. Apply even more force, even more residual scrolling. That's physics simulation. There are many different ways in which these clever design attributes have been incorporated into iPhone to replace the lack of tactile feedback with several layers of feedback.
If you're one of those people like me who stopped after a few minutes of using the iPhone wondering why it feels weird when you go back to a normal computer and why you got acclimated to the iPhone interface so quickly... it's BECAUSE of the way they combined direct object manipulation (e.g. pinching/stretching instead of using a magnifying glass icon and repeatedly clicking) with some basic physics simulation and responses that make operating the iphone as simple as knowing how to move objects anywhere in the real world.
That is the genius of multitouch. Apple would have been fools to put the question backwards and start with a physical keyboard to satisfy current market desire and try to get everything else other than text input to work harmoniously with such a clunky, non-direct input device.
Granted, I can type a LOT faster on a full-size keyboard than a multitouch interface... BUT, let's take a second to think about that. I've been typing on full-size keyboards for almost 30 years. Of COURSE I'm faster on this keyboard... I'm many, many times faster on this than I am on a small Treo keyboard. But within less than a DAY, I'm already typing many times faster on the virtual keyboard than I ever did on a Treo, or a Blackberry or the god-awful conventional phones I've had til now where while using SMS you have to click through each letter on the 10-digit keypad.
I will always be faster on a conventional full-size keyboard as long as I keep using it while I'm using multitouch... Perhaps check back with me in thirty years and see how lightning fast I am on a multitouch keyboard.
It's pretty amazing, I think, how they worked in additional features on the multitouch keyboard (such as the one-touch magnifying glass edit mode) to compensate for where you might ordinarily lose speed... Consider how any other company would have implemented a multitouch keyboard. Do you think with their tendency to follow linear, gradualistic progression (one baby-step tweak at a time, instead of paradigm shifts) that they would have anything even remotely as intuitive if they attempted (and they will very soon) to mimic the iPhone's way of doing things?
I always ask myself what would the iMac have looked like if Dell made it. They'd have started by insisting it cost less than half the iMac and then that condition would hang like a noose around their neck forcing use of cheaper materials... you can just imagine a display swivel arm made of cheap plastic with two tightening knobs at each joint... "Hilarious" is a word that comes to mind.
