Over at Daring Fireball, John wrote a post talking about mobile keyboards. The battle about mobile keyboards seems to almost reach the veracity of some other famous duels: Windows vs OS X, Ford vs Chevrolet, hamburgers or hot dogs, etc. I expect that my opinion of the subject will certainly not unite anyone into a harmonious chorus of kumbaya and push mobile phone manufacturers into my way of thinking, but here it is:
Software keyboards* are better. “Seriously?” you ask. Yes. Even better than the treo? Yes. Blackberry? The Pre? Yes. “Shill! Fanboy!” I here you call. Nope, I just think that the software keyboard works much better in the mobile space. Alright then, to the asterisk.
*Software keyboards can be better. They are not always. Just take a look at pretty much every phone aside from the iPhone. If you are one of those poor bastards that picked up a Samsung Instinct, one of the dozen knock offs released after the iPhone, or even the Blackberry Storm, I’m sorry. You are probably reading this and cursing at your screen. “Better?! You call this better?! The only key on this thing I can find is the damn backspace key because I use it more than any of the others.” No, I don’t. Those keyboards suck. Hard. I’ve had the pleasure of using a variety of those phones, and if I were stuck with one for my day-to-day, I’d probably stick the voice calls only. I’m sure right now you are furiously tapping out “fjijkng idot”.
No, mostly I am just talking about the iPhone. The iPhone gets a lot of things right (even while it screws up plenty of other things), and the keyboard is one of them, if you trust it. My wife hates typing anything on my iPhone because she doesn’t trust it. She focuses on tapping out each individual letter, which sacrifices a lot of speed. And I think this is why a lot of people hate it.
I was a somewhat early adopter of the iPhone, and as such, a lot of my friends wanted to play with it. Some of them “got it” with the keyboard, and some didn’t. Plenty guffawed after incorrectly hitting a few letters. What they didn’t realize, though, is that you don’t have to hit the right letters every time. The iPhone’s predictive text and auto-correct capabilities are why I love the thing.
Some examples. On the Apple’s iPhone keyboard page, they illustrate pretty well how the auto-correct works. Say you type “ouizza”. The iPhone realizes you meant “pizza” and if you don’t cancel the auto-correct, hitting space will change it the the right word. This is one of the reasons why after my first week with the iPhone, my Treo was left in the dust.
The second complaint about the iPhone keyboard is usually how small the keys are. But again, the iPhone has thought of that as well. Say you type the word “type”. As you are typing, the iPhone will start enlarging the targets for each letter invisibly. After you type “typ” the iPhone will enlarge the area around the ‘e’, since there aren’t any common words spelled “typr”, “typw” and so on.
Those two features make the iPhone much more usable for me. Of course, it is still ultimately a matter of preference. I’m sure your dad will tell you that those new-fangled software keyboards aren’t for him, just like the last good Mustang Ford made was the ‘67. While I prefer the feel of a solid Blackberry keyboard, I’m confident that even with practice I wouldn’t be able to type as fast on a hardware keyboard as I can on the iPhone.
Of course, the touch screen on the iPhone is also one of the things that I hate about it. Not because of how it works on the iPhone, but because now everyone seems to think that touch screens are better. Alas, that is another discussion.
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