who misses a keyboard?

[raymondu999]

for those of you who went iPhone from phones with "plastic keyboards," who actually misses it? For those of you from Nokias or Treos or HTC or Dopod or any other PDA/smartphone out there with keyboard, who of you actually miss your keyboard?

 

[citron230]

I had a blackberry before I bought my iPhone. I could type fast on the blackberry and without looking at the phone. With the iPhone's auto-correct feature I can type faster.
I don't miss a physical keyboard at all. It takes some practice, but after a couple weeks you typing quite fast.

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

I did not have much of an experience with another smart phone since I had very limited use with them, but I was quite surprised at how well the keyboard and autocorrect feature works on the iPhone. I can now type as fast or faster than with my limited use of other smart phones/PDAs.

 

[Nykwil]

I miss my on screen iphone keyboard.
I just sold my iPhone in anticipation of the new one and I'm using a cheapo samsung phone in the meantime. I honestly don't know how I ever typed messages out before the iphone. I cannot get used to actually tapping the same keys over and over again to type a message out.

July 11 can't come soon enough for me.

I haven't even bothered entering in my contacts or even responding to txt messages on this thing. I just do NOT want to get used to tacky plastic keys again.

 

[nick9191]

I've learned to type unbelievably fast on my iPod Touch. I've found that if you type carelessly and fast, more often than not the auto correct will get it right. Then you can go back and change the one or two errors it missed.

Brilliant technology

 

[RADIOHEADfan]

I had the first blackjack for about 7 months before i just went out and bought a iPhone. I agree with citron230, i can type way faster with the virtual keyboard since the auto correct.

 

[FarSeide]

I'm also ex-BB user and I dont miss it at all.

 

[earnjam]

I can type faster not just because of the auto-correct, but the fact that I don't have to press any buttons. You can move so much faster when you only have to lightly tap as opposed to pressing an actual button.

I've used blackberrys and I'll take my iPhone and it's virtual keyboard approach any day of the week.

PS - One common complaint is that punctuation is on a secondary keyboard where you have to hit a button to get to it, but what some people don't realize is that once you get good with it, you can do one finger capitalization, punctuation and numbers by doing the tap and slide technique. No need to press two buttons.

 

[Sasha-1]

I had two BlackBerry devices back to back for over a year. I recently decided to give them both away. In doing so I wanted to fully erase them. I pulled them out of the box and typed notes on the 8310 to see how it felt again. I like the iPhone so much better. I would never guess how much more I would like a virtual keyboard since I was one of the BB users who loved to claim that I preferred the physical keys. I was wrong, I admit it. The virtual keyboard works. It really works better than most would be willing to imagine it will.

Alex Alexzander

 

[Bickity]

I love the virtual keyboard. It is only there when I need it and after two weeks of "trusting it", I am typing faster than my old blackberry.

 

[raymondu999]

Well ditto here, I can type just as fast as on a normal keyboard (I don't know about faster) but I miss the tactile feel and feedback of physical keys. Doesn't anyone else?

 

[djransom]

I had a blackberry before I bought my iPhone. I could type fast on the blackberry and without looking at the phone. With the iPhone's auto-correct feature I can type faster.
I don't miss a physical keyboard at all. It takes some practice, but after a couple weeks you typing quite fast.

Ditto

 

[earnjam]

Well ditto here, I can type just as fast as on a normal keyboard (I don't know about faster) but I miss the tactile feel and feedback of physical keys. Doesn't anyone else?

Not one bit. In fact, after using the iPhone for a while, the act of pressing buttons on a blackberry or other phone with a full keyboard feels weird.

 

[rayward]

PS - One common complaint is that punctuation is on a secondary keyboard where you have to hit a button to get to it, but what some people don't realize is that once you get good with it, you can do one finger capitalization, punctuation and numbers by doing the tap and slide technique. No need to press two buttons.

A Blackberry requires two keys to be pressed simultaneously to type punctuation and numbers. I prefer the iPhone approach that lets you do the tap 'n' slide for a single character, as you said, but also holds the second keyboard if you need to type a longer number. On a BB, you're stuck with your thumb on the "Alt" button while trying to contort your other thumb around it to type numbers. Unless you're a carnie (small hands), your thumb always covers the "0" button.

I use both keyboards currently. The iPhone keyboard is streets ahead, IMHO.

 

[geekmommy4]

I don't have much to add, but I absolutely agree with the above posts. The iPhone seriously made me laugh when I first started trying to type fast. I was only hitting a few of the correct keys, but the great majority of what I typed showed up perfectly! Great party trick...well, for people who appreciate such stuff.

 

[rayward]

I don't have much to add, but I absolutely agree with the above posts. The iPhone seriously made me laugh when I first started trying to type fast. I was only hitting a few of the correct keys, but the great majority of what I typed showed up perfectly! Great party trick...well, for people who appreciate such stuff.

And because it's to easy to position the cursor to correct anything the auto-correct didn't understand, it only takes a moment to proof and fix as needed. On a BB, you have to navigate to your correction point using the wheel and "Alt" key. Which sucks.

 

[Wingnut330]

This was a concern for me as well. I'm moving from a Treo 700W and have gotten fairly good at typing on it. I was a little nervous to go to the iPhone keypad, but after reading this I'm excited because it sounds faster!

 

[mostro900]

I'm a Palm Treo 750 user(can't wait for the 3G iPhone) and I have to say that typing on my Touch is great. On the last few phones with keyboards that I have owned, I've founf that certain keys stop working - because of dust or whatever, I'm not sure, but it's a PITA.

Apple got it right with the touch screen keyboard and auto-correct.

 

[kdarling]

I don't miss hardware keys, but I don't like having the keyboard take up most of the screen.

I wish there was a way to have a slideout touch keyboard so that when I want to see the whole screen, I can. Or maybe even a Bluetooth keyboard for trips.

On other related notes:

It's a real pain sometimes to post a reply on forums, for example. Especially without copy/paste.

Also, the autocorrection sucks a lot of the time for me, especially with technical acronym searches, where it tries to second guess the abbreviations into something wacky. I prefer being able to turn it off. I sometimes prefer WM's version where multiple suggested words are shown but are not automatically used.

 

[rayward]

This was a concern for me as well. I'm moving from a Treo 700W and have gotten fairly good at typing on it. I was a little nervous to go to the iPhone keypad, but after read things I'm excited because it sounds faster!

The big thing, that Apple has pushed from day one, is "trust the software". It's hard at first, because you tend to monitor and try to control the auto-correct feature as you type. This slows you down and isn't necessary. After a while, hopefully very quickly, you learn to just keep going without stopping. The software does an amazing job of interpreting your less-than-precise taps. It's also a breeze to go back and fix anything it might have misinterpreted. The software learns too, so it gets better as you get faster.

There used to be a very helpful video on the Apple website, but I can't find it anymore. Now they just have this.

 

[Rigsby]

I'm just posting a 'me too' - I used Treos for years, and thought I was an adept smart-phone typist (although I did get tired thumbs on longer emails) and didn't quite like the iPhone keyboard to being, but once you've got used to it, it's great. The trick really is learning to trust auto-correct.

but what some people don't realize is that once you get good with it, you can do one finger capitalization, punctuation and numbers by doing the tap and slide technique. No need to press two buttons.

Thanks for this, a quick Google and I've learnt a lot more about how to use the keyboard.

 

[earnjam]

Thanks for this, a quick Google and I've learnt a lot more about how to use the keyboard.

Anytime. That definitely helped me a good bit when I learned it.

The other one that is helpful, but I don't use it as much is to double tap the spacebar at the end of a sentence and it will put the period in for you.

 

[zap2]

I had a Samsung BlackJack before the iPhone(only for about 2 months) and while the keyboard was nice, but I'm much happier with the iPhone's keyboard, because it won't get worn out.

My friends dumbphone has paint peeling off of the keys because she texts so much....thats isn't likely to happen on my iPhone.

 

[7on]

I type with one hand whereas the HTC Herald I had needed two hands (slide out qwerty)

I type much faster with the iphone.

 

[danedane5]

At first there was a learning curve without the keys, but now i can type on it without any probs without even looking, so do I miss it? Nope, specially since i can change languages on the fly.