June 24th, 2007
Inside scoop: iPhone's touchscreen keypad kinda sucks
In Focus » See more posts on: iPhone
(image via Engadget)
Ryan at Engadget’s been in communication with a trusted source who has spent more than a bit of time with the iPhone in recent days.
As noted pretty much everywhere, iPhone doesn’t have a device-mounted keypad. The keypad is touchscreen, or virtual.
Apparently from what Ryan’s source tells him, the touchscreen keypad comes up more than a bit short.
After consulting his source on this, Ryan reports that:
- The keyboard was simply described as “disappointing”. Keyboarding with two thumbs often registers multiple key presses (two or three at a time) resulting in a lot of mistakes. The best way to type is with a single finger (as shown in most of Apple’s demos), but two thumbs is supposedly very difficult. After trying it for a number of days our source gave up using their thumbs.
- The text auto-correction only works well for simple words, but doesn’t work for proper names. We can only assume this bit will get better with time as Apple fills out its predictive text dictionary.
- The touchscreen was said to, in general, require somewhat hard presses to register input, and needs some getting used to.
Given this information, let me give you another chance to respond to our earlier about the iPhone touchscreen:
Loading ...Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
